The Teaching of the Fathers

Anglicans have classically looked to the early church for our basic standards of belief. The reforms of the 16th century that produced the Book of Common Prayer and the Church of England, were an effort to go back to the sources, to Scripture, but also to the Christianity of the first few centuries. Lancelot Andrewes, the great Anglican divine of the 17th century, put it this way:

"One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period -- the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith."

The basic presupposition was that early Christians 'got it' -- that whatever "orthodox doctrine" entails, the Christians of the first few centuries give us the definitive standard of Christian believing.

In recent years, there has been a new effort among many theologians and clergy, even surprisingly among Evangelicals, to learn from the writings of the early Church Fathers. Various Biblical commentaries have appeared, consisting of quotations from early writers that present early Christian interpretations of Biblical texts. Also widely available are collections of daily readings from the Church Fathers for the entire liturgical year that correlated with the Daily Office Lectionary.

The Enlightenment

The effort to recover the vitality of early Christian teaching reflects a growing frustration with modern theology and the secular influence of what historians call "the Enlightenment." The Enlightenment was a movement of thought from the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called "Age of Reason," that stressed reason and individualism over tradition and supernaturalism. Enlightenment, said the philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, "is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." Human beings are now to think for themselves and not take anything as true on the basis of external authority or ancient tradition.

The Enlightenment supplied the agenda and the intellectual leverage for rapid developments in science and the capitalist economic order. At the same time, it put Christianity on the defensive. While some Enlightenment thinkers were hostile to Christianity, many were not, but they invariably sought to recast Christianity in purely rationalist terms. As Immanuel Kant put it, the Enlightenment necessitated a "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason." A classic expression of Enlightenment religion is the "Jefferson Bible," an edition of the Gospels in which Thomas Jefferson sought to distill what he took to be the essence of Christianity by removing all references to miracles or any form of supernaturalism, and presented Jesus as a rational teacher and example of moral living.

By the early twentieth century, many theologians came to feel that the influence of the Enlightenment had reduced God to an abstraction, and produced a worldly and spiritually arid Christianity. Notably, the Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, trained by the most prestigious figures of liberal German theology, came to believe that the rationalized humanistic Christianity of the Enlightenment had nothing to do with the God of the Bible. Returning to the Reformers and the Church Fathers, he proclaimed an "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and humanity. God, he insisted, was "the wholly other" who breaks in upon our humanity "perpendicularly from above" in Christ. God's self-revelation is utterly distinct from the project of human culture and a domesticated religion adapted to the Enlightenment creed that humanity is the measure of all things.

Nevertheless, those, who like Barth, have reservations of about theological liberalism, and have sought to learn from the Christian thinkers of the past, have also come to recognize that these early Christian witnesses have their limitations as well. As vibrant as the early experience and teaching of early church may have been, early Christians brought their own assumptions and cultural blinders to bear as much as the liberal theologians of the Enlightenment.

Does God Change -- or Suffer?

One theme in that preoccupied early Christians was the "immutability' of God. Immutability means "changelessness," which was seen as a key aspect of the perfection of God. This idea, however, derived not so much from Scripture as from the Greek philosophy that was part of the surrounding culture of early Christianity.

Plato had said in The Republic that "God and everything that belongs to God is in every way in the best possible state." Any change in God, could only be a change for the worse -- "It must necessarily be for the worse if God is changed. For we surely will not say that God is deficient in either beauty or excellence."

This notion of changeless of God raised difficulties for the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation -- the proclamation that the Word should undergo a change and "become flesh," that the one "who was in the form of God would not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but empty himself, and take the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:6-7). Most challenging was the idea that the eternal Son would actually suffer. The whole drama of incarnation and atonement seemed inconsistent with a changeless God. Some early Christians resorted to the caveat that only the humanity of Christ experienced suffering, while his divine nature remained impervious. In the end, however, the Biblical witness to the suffering of the Incarnate Son of God prevailed. But one thing was certain to the Christians of late antiquity; the perceived error of "Patripassianism" -- the suffering of the Father -- had to be avoided at all cost.

"How Can I Give You Up?"

For the Hebrew prophets, abstract notions of God's immutability, or His incapacity to suffer were not at issue. The personal God of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was entirely different from the abstract God of the Philosophers. Hosea wrote:

"How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me;"How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah, my compassion grows warm and tender." (Hosea 11:8)

God cannot bring himself to give up on his people, despite their persistent disobedience and rebellion. In this passage, God reveals His inner nature, and displays his feeling for his people -- his tenderness, even his anguish.

The modern Jewish writer Abraham Heschel spoke of God's divine "pathos." Heschel left his native Poland shortly before the Nazi invasion, and eventually settled in the United States where he taught at the Jewish theological Seminary in Manhattan.

While some have insisted that a suffering God is pure "anthropomorphism" -- the projection of human characteristics onto a transcendent changeless God --Heschel argued that the Biblical God is not "anthropomorphic," but rather "anthropopathic." God actually has feelings of joy and anguish analogous to the feelings of human beings -- without this involving any diminishment of his perfection.

God, says Heschel, "is moved and affected by what happens in the world and he reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath."

Heschel describes God's capacity to feel love and anguish as the "divine pathos." Pathos is generally defined as "a quality that evokes pity or sadness." To Heschel, it is the key to the revealed character of God. "Echoed in almost every prophetic statement, pathos is the central category of the prophetic understanding of God."

"God as a personal Being: He has concern for nondivine being. He is always felt as He Who feels, thought of as He Who thinks, never as object, always as a Being Who wills and acts. He is encountered not as universal, general, pure Being, but always in a particular mode of being, as personal God to a personal man."

What are we to take from this? We could perhaps affirm a qualified immutability in the sense that God is faithful to his Word, not deflected from his purpose. But God is not an immovable unchangeable divine principle. He is a "Living God," a divine person, who loves us with all the joy and anguish with which we ourselves love.

The Rev. Dr. Christopher Brown is the rector of Trinity Church, Potsdam, NY. He also currently serves as the Dean of the St. Lawrence Deanery, and Archdeacon and Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Albany. This article first appeared in the Albany Episcopalian magazine