INCARNATION AND TRINITY

The emergence of transcendence in the ancient Near East began a process of withdrawal that eventually led to a divine absence that was the functional equivalent of the death of God. Christianity reverses this trajectory with a God who actually becomes embodied in time and space. As transcendence is emptied into immanence, God once again dies, and nature, as well as history, eventually is sacralized, or resacralized. Christianity is not, of course, the simple negation of Judaism; to the contrary, Christians believe their God to be the same as the God of what they label the Old Testament.14 Like Jews, early Christians were monotheists devoted to the transcendent God, who is the sole creator of the universe. The fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism concerns the status of the historical person named Jesus. Whereas Jews believe Jesus stands in a long line of religious prophets who are human, most Christians are convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, who, as the unique Son of God, is divine. The unyielding insistence on divine transcendence makes it impossible for Jews to accept the divinity of Jesus or any other fi nite being. While disagreeing with Judaism on this critical issue, Christianity’s commitment to monotheism creates diffi culties for belief in the divinity of Jesus. If Jesus is divine, how can God be One? The fate of Christianity and, by extension, the history of the West turns on this question.

When expectations for the imminent return of Jesus were disappointed, the early Christian community was forced to rethink its commitments and reformulate its beliefs. As Christians began to turn their attention from hope for the future to the realities of the present, they found themselves immersed in an extraordinarily complex social, cultural, and spiritual world. Although the rule of Augustus (emperor from 27 bce to 14 ce) brought the Roman Empire a period of peace and optimism between eras of decline and decay, the initial centuries of Christian history were, for the most part, times of social and political unrest. Augustus’s success lay in his effort to reverse the movement away from the ideal of republican principles for which Rome had stood that had started with Julius Caesar’s (100–44 bce) assumption of dictatorial power. He attempted to return signifi cant power to the Roman Senate and to serve as a representative of the people. This political program was part of Augustus’s overall aim of bringing peace and stability to an empire that had long been at war. In many ways, Augustus’s efforts were successful; a semblance of republican government again was achieved, and peace came to the empire. Augustus’s successors, however, were less skillful in preserving the shaky peace. Times of relative tranquility were punctuated with violence and repression. The inability of later rulers to maintain the delicate balance established by Augustus was especially evident in the crisis of the third century. During this period, the very social and moral fabric of Roman society seemed on the verge of unraveling. Under internal siege at the hands of Roman warlords and faced with external attack by raiding barbarians, the empire’s fragile stability crumbled. As conditions worsened, Christians became the target of persecutions, which at fi rst were local and sporadic, but as the problems of the empire worsened, attacks grew more severe. In 177, Marcus Aurelius proclaimed that Christians were a menace to the empire and should be tortured to death. By the middle of the third century, the political and social crisis of the empire resulted in Decius’s (emperor, 249–51) systematic persecution of Christians. The beginning of the fourth century brought Emperor Diocletian’s (284–305) prohibition of practicing Christianity under penalty of death.

In an effort to defend themselves against charges of superstition, atheism, moral laxity, and sedition, Christian apologists recast their beliefs in terms of Greek philosophy as it had been developed primarily in Platonism and Neoplatonism. The result was a conjunction of Christian theology and Platonic philosophy that created tensions that were never completely resolved. During the formative years of Christianity, Jewish monotheism and Platonism combined to create a notion of God that made it virtually impossible to affi rm both the divinity of Jesus and the unity of God. The major church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries were devoted to establishing what became the orthodox interpretation of Jesus. While agreement eventually was reached, the full implications of creeds approved by the Councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), and Chalcedon (451) did not become clear until the nineteenth century. When fully elaborated, the doctrine of the Incarnation requires the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity, in turn, implies a theology of nature, history, and culture that comes to completion in the notion of divine life as a process of creative emergence.

As we will see, it is a mistake to relegate the esoteric doctrines of Christology and the Trinity to “the dust-bin of history,” which is the domain of historians and theologians. The debates of the fourth and fifth centuries have shaped subsequent history and thought in ways that could never have been anticipated at the time. Indeed, what eventually become modernism and postmodernism in the West cannot be adequately understood apart from their theological genealogy. This claim admittedly will appear outlandish and, therefore, will be resisted by some. If, however, readers are willing to suspend their disbelief and engage in rethinking of traditional theology in light of later developments and in reinterpreting modernism and postmodernism through classical theology, unexpected insights will, I believe, emerge.

The central doctrine of Christianity is Christology; indeed, without the Incarnation there is no Christianity. To affirm the incarnation of God in the historical person of Jesus is to believe that the real, however it is figured, is not elsewhere but is, in some sense, present here and now. The problem theologians and church offi cials faced was to find a way to affirm the divinity of Jesus while at the same time preserving the unity of God. Coming up with a rational solution to this problem was virtually impossible because of the way unity and identity were understood at the time of the early church councils. Rather than an inclusive or dialectical notion of unity and identity, Platonism and then -  current monotheism presupposed an exclusive idea of unity in which plurality, multiplicity, and difference are irreconcilable with identity. Since something is either one or many — either identical or different—it cannot be both at the same time. And yet, the identity of identity and difference or unity of unity and multiplicity is precisely what the acceptance of monotheism and divinity of Jesus requires. If Jesus were God, God, it would seem, cannot be one but must be at least two. After all, how can God — or anything else — be one and more than one at the same time? The problem is compounded by the belief that the unity of God entails his immutability; if God were one, he cannot change, and correlatively, whatever changes cannot be God. The commitment to an exclusive notion of unity and identity leaves only three possible alternatives for the Father-Son relationship:

1. The Father and Son are identical, which violates the principle of noncontradiction and, therefore, seems irrational.
2. The Father and Son are different, which is reasonable but theologically problematic.
3. The Father and Son are somehow identical in their difference, which would resolve the problem but requires a new notion of reason.

The solution to this conundrum eventually turns out to be the unlikely claim that God is not merely one but is three-in-one. The implications of the complex relation between the doctrine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity are not immediately obvious; indeed, it took over a century and a half to resolve the problem in other than a perfunctory way, and even then few understood the importance of the issue.

In the fourth century, these abstruse theological debates had serious political consequences. By this time, the situation of the Christians had changed dramatically. No longer a persecuted minority, Christianity had become the privileged religion of the empire with the “conversion” of Constantine at the battle of the Milvain Bridge in 312. While the Edict of Milan (313) granted religious freedom to all citizens, Constantine’s policy gradually shifted from religious neutrality to policies favoring Christianity. His motives, however, were more political than religious — Constantine thought Christianity could provide the foundation for the political integration of the entire empire. His rule in the West was secure, but the Eastern Empire was governed by his brother- in- law, Licinius, whose policy of complete religious tolerance led to instability in 321, when a dispute broke out between Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and Arius, who was a presbyter in his church. While the focus of the controversy was the status of the Son’s relation to the Father within the Godhead, the dispute had much wider implications. Alexander’s chief concern was soteriological; salvation, he argued, is impossible if Jesus is not divine. Though not uninterested in redemption, Arius, who was a radical monotheist, was primarily concerned with the preservation of the absolute transcendence, unity, and immutability of God. If Jesus were God, he countered, the immutable would be mutable, which is both a logical and a theological contradiction. Over the next three years, a series of councils and synods and a variety of political maneuvers failed to settle the issue. In 324 the uneasy truce between the Western and Eastern Empires broke down. Constantine defeated, exiled, and eventually ordered Licinius killed on trumped-up political charges. The triumphant emperor initially dismissed the theological controversy as “a trifling and foolish dispute about words” but, when the conflict threatened to undercut his political gains, quickly sought a resolution of the issue. On May 20, 325, Constantine convened a general church council in Nicaea for the purpose of reaching a theological consensus that would ensure the stability of the empire. He soon realized, however, that his hope for a quick resolution of the issue was an idle fantasy.

Both parties in the dispute traced their positions back to Origen, who had been the head of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, Origen appropriated Platonism and Neoplatonism to interpret the Christian faith. In On First Principles, which is the first Christian summa, he developed a comprehensive, though not always consistent, theology, which he expanded into a philosophy of the universe. His writings remain fraught with tensions and plagued by unresolved contradictions; indeed, these contradictions are precisely what made his thought so influential. Opposing sides in disputes could justifiably appeal to the authority of Origen to support their positions. On the critical issue of the relation between the Son and the Father, Origen at some points maintains that the Son is equal to the Father but elsewhere insists that the Son is subordinate to the Father. In some contexts he insists that the Son is “coeternal and without beginning: As regards the power of his works, then, the Son is in no way whatever separate or different from the Father, nor is his work anything other than the Father’s work, but there is one and the same movement, so to speak, in all they do; consequently the Father has called him an ‘unspotted mirror,’ in order to make it understood that there is absolutely no dissimilarity between the Son and the Father.”15 To underscore this important point, he introduced a term that became central in subsequent debates — homoousion, which means of the same essence or substance. Homoousion eventually is distinguished from homoiousion (of like essence or substance) and anomoean (of different essence or substance). In other passages, however, Origen contradicts the claim that the Father and Son are equal by arguing that there is a hierarchy within the Godhead as well as within the created order:

"The God and Father, who holds the universe together, is superior to every being that exists, for he imparts to each one from his own existence that which each one is; the Son, being less than the Father, is superior to rational creatures alone (for he is second to the Father); the Holy Spirit is still less, and dwells within the saints alone. So that in this way the power of the Father is greater than that of the Son and that of the Holy Spirit, and that of the Son is more than that of the Holy Spirit, and in turn the power of the Holy Spirit exceeds that of every other holy being"16

Those who insisted on the equality or identity of the Father and Son came to be known as right- wing Origenists and those who maintained that the Son is subordinate to the Father were labeled left- wing Origenists.

The Arians were left- wing Origenists, who believed that the only reasonable position is the subordination of the Son (the historical Jesus) to the Father (the transcendent immutable God). Right-wing Origenists, by contrast, insisted on the complete identity of the Son and the Father. To preserve monotheism while at the same time affi rming the divinity of Jesus, right-wing Origenists argued that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not ontologically different but are different modalities of the same substance. The technical name of this point of view is Modalistic Monarchianism and its chief representative was Sabellius. In Sabellius’s own words: “The same is the Father, the same is the Son, the same is the Holy Spirit. They are three names, but names for the same reality.” In such a theology God the Father inevitably suffers, and critics who were devoted to divine impassibility labeled Sabellius’s position Patripassionism. For Arius and his followers, the claim that God suffers is blasphemous. To avoid “contaminating” the eternal God with the vicissitudes of temporality, they argued, there can be no substantial identity between the Father and the Son. The Son not only is subordinate to the Father but is actually a creature. In a letter defending his beliefs written to Eusebius of Nicomedia around 318, Arius confesses:

"What is it that we say, and think and have taught, and teach? That the son is not unbegotten, nor a part of the unbegotten in any way, nor [formed out] of any substratum, but that he was constituted by [God’s] will and counsel, before times and before ages... We are persecuted because we say, “The Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning.” For this we are persecuted, and because we say “He is [made] out of things that were not.” But this is what we say, since he is neither a part of God nor [formed] out of any substratum"17

Though he resists admitting the conclusion, Arius actually denies the Incarnation. If God were to become flesh and suffer, he would no longer be God, but if the Son is subordinate to the Father, there is no Incarnation.

For Alexander and his followers, to deny the Incarnation is to deny the possibility of salvation. It is, therefore, urgent to establish the full divinity of Jesus. In the years leading up to the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius, whose name means “man of immortality,” became the chief spokesperson for the Alexandrian position. Athanasius explains his differences with the Arians:

"if the Son were a creature, man had remained mortal as before, not being joined to God; for a creature had not joined creatures to God, as seeking itself one to join it; nor would a portion of the creation have been the creation’s salvation, as needing salvation itself. To provide against this also, He sends His own Son, and He becomes Son of Man, by taking created flesh... For, the Word being clothed in flesh, as has many times been explained every bite of the serpent began to be utterly staunched from out it; and wherever evil sprung from the motions of the flesh, to be cut away"18

In other words, unless God becomes incarnate, salvation is impossible. To counter what he regarded as the pernicious subordinationism of the Arians, Athanasius insists on the substantial identity of the Father and the Son. Appropriating the term Origen had introduced, he argues that the Father and Son are homoousios—of the same substance. When the Council of Nicaea fi nally convened in a highly charged political atmosphere, representatives sided with Alexander and Athanasius and explicitly rejected the Arian position. The Trinitarian structure of the Nicene Creed asserts without explaining that the divinity of the Son does not compromise the unity and eternity of God:

"We believe in one God, Father, Almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible, And in one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father uniquely, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things were made, both things in heaven and those on earth, who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate, [and] became man; he suffered and rose on the third day, ascended into heaven, and is coming to judge living and dead, And in the Holy Spirit"19

The Council of Nicaea did not, however, settle the controversy; disputes running so deep are never resolved quickly. In the years following the council, the differences among opposing parties became even more pronounced. When Constantine died in 337, the tenuous unity of the empire threatened to dissolve in a theological dispute that had become thoroughly politicized. Though many sought to fashion a compromise that would appease everyone, Athanasius was tenacious in his defense of the creed. His chief concern always remained salvation. In his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, he concisely summarizes the gist of his position: “For he [God] was made man that we might be made God; and he manifested himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and he endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”20 In 381, the Council of Constantinople reaffi rmed the Nicene Creed and condemned all surviving Arians. While this council brought to a close one of the most protracted and important theological disputes in the history of Christianity, important questions about the person of Jesus were left unanswered.

The debates surrounding the Council of Nicaea were so preoccupied with establishing or denying the divinity of the Son that the status of Jesus’ humanity remained unclear. Shortly after the theological crisis seemed to have been resolved, contentious disputes once again erupted. The exclusive view of unity and identity again left only three options:

1. Jesus is fully God but not fully man.
2. Jesus is fully man but not fully God.
3. Jesus is fully God and fully man.

The two poles in these debates were represented by theologians and churchmen from Alexandria, who affi rmed the divinity but denied the humanity of the Son, and those from Antioch, who affirmed the humanity but denied the divinity of the Son.

Since Alexandrians were more concerned with the heavenly than the earthly, they were drawn to mystical spirituality and tended to read scripture allegorically. Apollinaris, one of the staunchest supporters of the Alexandrian position, argued that, since human being is temporal, transient, and corruptible and divinity is eternal, unchanging, and incorruptible, it is impossible for them both to be fully present in a single undivided being. The question, then, is how the divine and the human can be united. For Apollinaris it is philosophically impossible for both the divine and the human to be fully present in a single undivided being. The only reasonable position, he believed, is for one nature to be completely present and the other nature only partially present. Since the divine nature cannot be incomplete and thus imperfect, human nature must be partially present in Jesus Christ. Apollinaris concludes that the divine is present as Jesus’ mind but that his body remains completely human. “For God incarnate in human flesh keeps His own active energy, Mind being untouched by animal and bodily passions, and guiding the body and its movements divinely and sinlessly; not only unconquered by death but destroying death. And he is true God, the incorporeal appearing in flesh, perfect in true and divine perfections, not two persons, not two natures.”21 This position and its opposite (i.e., that the Son was fully man but not fully God) are known as Monophysitism (i.e., one nature). In subsequent debates, it became clear that Apollinaris’s denial that Jesus Christ is two natures — both divine and human — is also tantamount to the rejection of the Incarnation.

It is important to recognize the implications of this Christology. Although not explicitly expressed, the denial of the Son’s full humanity is a negative judgment about the created order and bodily existence. This position is consistent with the oppositional logic that underlies the exclusive notion of identity and unity. The logic of either/or issues are dualisms that can be neither reconciled nor mediated. During the formative years of Christianity, esoteric traditions that traced their roots to ancient Zoroastrianism were very popular throughout the region. Manichaeism and different forms of Christian and non- Christian Gnosticism attracted many followers and were for a while serious rivals of Christianity. Though the details of myths and rituals differ, all of these movements shared a view of God as radically transcendent and the world as utterly corrupt. Human beings are exiled in a world of darkness and seek to escape to the realm of pure light. Traces of these traditions can be detected in Alexandrian Christology, which denies that divinity can be fully embodied in humanity. Throughout the history of Christianity, versions of Manichaeism and Gnosticism repeatedly appear and claim to be the true version of the faith. But nothing is farther from the vision of life implicit in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity than such otherworldly dualisms.

Antiochean Christology is the polar opposite of the Alexandrian position. In contrast to the mystical and allegorical propensities of Alexandrian Christology, Antiocheans tended to be more literal, interested in the historical figure of Jesus, and devoted to Jesus as an ethical model for life in the world. As the controversy about the relation between divinity and humanity in Jesus continued, the focus shifted to the question of whether Mary was the mother of God (i.e., theotokos). To counter Apollinaris’s tendency to absorb Jesus’ humanity in divinity, Nestorius argued that since like can give birth only to like, Mary is the mother of the man Jesus but not of the divine Word, or Logos: “If anyone wishes to use this word theotokos with reference to the humanity which was born, joined to God the Word, and not with reference to the parent, we say that this word is not appropriate for her who gave birth, since a true mother should be of the same essence as what is born of her.”22 While Apollinaris tended to deny the humanity in order to affirm the divinity of Christ, Nestorius tended to deny the divinity in order to affirm the humanity of Christ. What neither could imagine was that Jesus Christ could be fully divine and fully human. Yet this is precisely what is required for salvation according to what finally became Christian orthodoxy. Gregory of Nazianzus, who played a central role in the debate, made the crucial point concisely: “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed.” Gregory condemned both Apollinaris’s denial of the full embodiment of divinity in humanity and Nestorius’s rejection of the full divinity of the human person named Jesus. Though it took many years of theological argument and political maneuvering, the church eventually accepted Gregory’s position. This understanding of the relation between the Father and the Son is formulated in the creed approved at the Council of Chalcedon:

"Following therefore the holy Fathers, we confess one and the same our Lord Jesus Christ, and we all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body, consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and the same consubstantial with us in manhood, like us in all things except sin; begotten before ages of the Father in Godhood, the same in the last days for us; and for our salvation [born] of Mary the virgin theotokos in manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, unique; acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, different natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved, and [each] combining in one Person and hypostasis"23

Here at last is the formulation of the hypostatic union, which still remains orthodox Christology: one person, two natures — fully God and fully man. To proclaim, however, is not to explain; the acceptance of the formula did not end the debate. Disputes have continued to simmer and at times have broken out, creating deep divisions that in some cases have led to lasting schisms.

One of the reasons for the lingering confusions is that the philosophical assumptions underlying the critical categories cannot express the insights theologians and churchmen were struggling to articulate. The intent of the creed is clear but its language is not. The church fathers wanted to affirm the full divinity and full humanity of the Son. It is important to recall that theological claims not only are about God but also entail beliefs about self and world. To embrace the full divinity and humanity of Jesus is to affirm that the real can be embodied in time and space, and therefore, nature and history are themselves in some sense real rather than illusory or merely apparent. Confusions inevitably arose because the language at the disposal of early church theologians made it virtually impossible for them to express the complexities of their vision. This is evident in the key terms in the creed:

"... consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and the same consubstantial with us in manhood... two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, different natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved, and [each] combining in one Person and hypostasis"

The terms that caused all the problems were hypostasis, substance, and nature. The words hypostasis and substance express similar metaphysical presuppositions inasmuch as they both draw a hierarchical distinction between surface and depth. While depth is essential, surface is accidental. Hypostasis literally means “that which lies beneath as the basis or foundation.” In a similar manner, substance designates “that which stands (stare) beneath (sub).” Accordingly, substance is “the essential nature of anything; the primary or basic element that receives modifications.” 24 The distinction between hypostasis or substance and accident is isomorphic with the distinction between unity and multiplicity as well as identity and difference. Within this schema, unity and identity underlie and thus are the foundation of multiplicity and difference. The issue once again turns on the question of unity and identity, on the one hand, and multiplicity or difference, on the other.

In a little- known book titled The Doctrine of the Trinity, Leonard Hodgson describes what I have defined as the difference between exclusive and inclusive views of unity in terms of the distinction between arithmetical and organic unity. While the criterion of arithmetical unity is “the absence of multiplicity,” organic unity “exists as a complex differing of constituents.”

"The idea of unity in our minds is primarily an arithmetical idea: the criterion is the absence of multiplicity. Here one is one and three are three; what is one is not three and what are three are not one. But we have long been acquainted with unities which are not so simple. There is, for example, aesthetic unity, the unity of a work of art. And there is organic unity, the unity of a living creature. In both of these the unity is far from being simple. It does indeed exclude certain kinds of multiplicity, such as a distracting multiplicity of interests in a work of art, or a lack of coordination in the activities of a living creature. But it can only exist at all by virtue of the presence of another kind of multiplicity, the multiplicity of varied elements, which constitute the work of art or the living creature"25

The problem with the orthodox formulations of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity is that they attempt to express organic unity in arithmetical terms. The inevitable result is a contradiction that seems to shatter reason. Confronted with such a contradiction, many believers over the centuries have felt that the best response is to embrace Tertullian’s well-known dictum Credo quia absurdum. From this point of view, it is impossible to think that the infinitely and qualitatively different God has become incarnate in the particular historical figure of Jesus. The Incarnation is a coincidentia oppositorium, which, in Kierkegaard’s memorable phrase, is the Absolute Paradox. “The paradox,” he explains, “unites the contradictories, and is the historical made eternal, and the Eternal made historical.” “It is easy to see, though it scarcely needs to be pointed out, since it is involved in the fact that reason is set aside and faith is not a form of knowledge; all knowledge is either a knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is historical.”26

But what if unity and identity are inclusive rather than exclusive — complex rather than simple? Though Hodgson does not refer to Kant, his account of the unity characteristic of natural organisms and works of art is clearly reminiscent of the notion of inner teleology developed in the Third Critique. As we discovered in chapter 3, post-Kantian philosophers and poets extended Kant’s argument to develop a notion of the modern subject, which is prefigured in Luther’s theological anthropology. It now becomes apparent that this entire trajectory is inseparable from the theological disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries. But the far-reaching implications of the Incarnation and Trinity for the modern period did not become clear until Hegel developed his system.27 This is not to suggest, of course, that the doctrines of Christology and the Trinity were not the subject of heated arguments over the centuries. But the terms of debate precluded an adequate resolution of the issues. A decisive turning point was reached when Hegel developed his dialectical interpretation of spirit to account for the contradictions inherent in Luther’s account of subjectivity. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel takes the category that is central to the Trinitarian and Christological controversies — substance — as his point of departure: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”28 When the True is finally grasped as subject, God becomes fully embodied in nature as well as history and both self and world are completely transformed. This transformation reverses the interrelated processes of desacralization and disenchantment by revealing the sacred in the midst of what had seemed profane. With this twist, secularity appears to be the fulfillment rather than the simple negation of religion.

NOTES

14. As we will see below, some of the most influential Christian theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were committed to a God who is as radically transcendent as Yahweh.
15. Origen, On First Principles, ed. G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 16, 26.
16. Ibid., 33–34.
17. Arius, “The Letter of Arius to Eusebius of Nicomedia,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 330.
18. Athanasius, “Against the Arians,” in Readings in the History of Christian Thought, ed. Robert Ferm (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 148.
19. Nicene Creed, in Christology of the Later Fathers, 338.
20. Athanasius, “On the Incarnation of the Word,” in Christology of the Later Fathers,107–8.
21. See Christology of the Later Fathers, 124–25.
22. Nestorius, “The First Letter of Nestorius to Celestine,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, 348.
23. Christology of the Later Fathers, 373.
24. American Heritage Dictionary, s.vv.
25. Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Nisbet and Co., 1943), 90–91. In developing his argument, Hodgson was strongly influenced by John Laird’s interpretation of the tripartite structure of the self. See John Laird, Problems of the Self (London: Macmillan, 1917).
26. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1971), 47, 76.
27. In his extensive study Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth- Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Lewis Ayres develops a detailed history of historical developments surrounding the fourth-and fifth-century Christological and Trinitarian controversies.While Ayres is informative on many particular theological issues, his analysis suffers from important philosophical limitations. Two points must be emphasized in this context: the first concerns one of the principal claims he develops throughout the book and the second involves his account of Hegel. In his introduction, Ayres writes: “Throughout the book I will argue that we should avoid thinking of these controversies as focusing on the status of Christ as ‘divine’ or ‘not divine.’ They focus, first, on debates about the generation of the Word or Son from the Father. Second, the controversies involve debates about the ‘grammar’ of human speech about the divine” (3). While the emphasis on the complexities of grammar is, as we have seen, important, Ayres’s criticism of analyses of “the status of Christ as ‘divine’ or ‘not divine’” is misleading. Our consideration of the contrasting strands in Origen’s theology has made it clear that the question of the generation of the Word or Son from the Father is nothing other than the question of the divine or nondivine status of the Son. This point is closely related to problems Ayres encounters in his discussion of Hegel’s view of the Trinity and the influence it has exercised on later thinkers. Summarizing his misgivings about Hegel’s position, Ayres writes: Because Spirit operates both as the name for a Trinitarian person and as a controlling concept for his system as a whole, Hegel can clearly present the realization of the Spirit as a distinct moment beyond the Son’s. Even if we must, in Hegel’s case, bear in mind the sophistication with which he deploys the concept of God in Godself, his separation of the roles of Son and Spirit and his lack of interest in the notion of the Body of Christ in favor of the Spirit-filled community take up themes from previous Protestant tradition and reinforce the direction of its arguments. (406) As will become clear in what follows, this is a serious misunderstanding of Hegel’s position that fails to recognize the radical notion of Incarnation that informs his entire speculative philosophy. In addition to an inadequate grasp of Hegelian philosophy, Ayres’s argument suffers from a failure to work out the historical, social, and cultural implications of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity.
28. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 9–10.

By Mark C. Taylor in "After God", The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,2007, excerpts pp.141-153. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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