There’s a dilemma that anyone trained in historical-critical scholarship on biblical literature on the one hand and the formation of Early Christian theology on the other will eventually face. It is a dilemma that I might frame as the ad hoc problem, and it goes something like this: the best historical reconstruction of the life and aims of Jesus of Nazareth that we can manage is to say that Jesus was a devout Jew and Jewish apocalyptic prophet interested in what he understood as a restoration of the Jewish nation that would coincide with a change in the world order. Specifically, Jesus thought that in the near future God would send a messianic redeemer, the Son of Man, who would bring about a resurrection of the dead, judge the nations, and rule over a restored Israel and, from Israel, over the other nations of the world. Jesus probably thought this person would be himself, and his career as a prophet, teaching in Jewish synagogues throughout Galilee and Judea and functioning in ways the crowds understood as those of an exorcist, a healer, and a miracle-worker (the Greek word for this is thaumaturge). Jesus was crucified by the Romans—a punishment they reserved for social rebels and insurrectionists—but his disciples had ecstatic visions of him alive again and continued to have such visions for several years after his death; the experience was had both by people that knew Jesus very well, like his brother James and his chief disciple Peter, and by people that didn’t personally know Jesus, like Paul and perhaps “the beloved disciple,” John the Elder. James, Peter, and Paul were all convinced that Jesus would soon return in a parousia, his public visitation, to fulfill the mission he had begun during his lifetime, and understood the visions of him to mean that he had been raised from the dead and vindicated by God as messiah.
The preaching (kerygma) of the Kingdom therefore carried over into the first generation of Jesus’s followers after his death, as Jesus’s family and disciples now proclaimed his imminent coming would bring Israel’s restoration. But in 62, James, otherwise highly respected by the populace of Jerusalem, was killed on the orders of the high priest Ananus; by 64, Peter and Paul were both probably dead (tradition places them in Rome to die by Nero’s hand in the persecution that followed the Great Fire in Rome, but modern historians question this). In the Jewish-Roman War that erupted from 66-74 CE, the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 and the rebels defeated, but Jesus had not come back. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew were likely composed in part to try and make sense of Jesus traditions and faith in a post-70 context, though much about their authorship and context remains disputed by scholars.
Luke and John, though, intentionally seek to soften the apocalyptic eschatology both of Jesus and of Paul, whose seven surviving, authentic letters clearly envision an imminently returning Jesus functioning as a Davidic messiah. Some texts possibly written in this period, like Revelation, looked to keep the expectation of an imminent eschaton alive, but a tradition in the Deutero-Pauline and Pastoral epistles and in second century Christian theology increasingly sought to apologize for the eschaton’s delay, stretching the parousia into the future from their perspective (Irenaeus) or else immanentizing earlier Christian apocalypticism as a fully realized eschaton (Origen).
The later Christian Creeds and theologians reflect the inconclusive character of the conversation in Christian theology, which was further challenged by new developments like, among other things, the Christianization of the Roman Empire and, much later, the rise of Islam. It’s only in this later context that the two hallmark doctrines of Christianity—God as Trinity and the exact terms of the union of divinity and humanity in the Incarnation of Christ—are articulated, and only in this later context that they come to be seen as the standards of Christian belief, behavior, and belonging. These doctrines are also, crucially, worked out in a consciously polemical tradition of discourse that seeks to elevate Christianity at the expense of Hellenism on the one hand (contra Greco-Roman traditional religion) but also, more crucially, Judaism on the other. So, the dilemma: are these doctrines historical accidents, ad hoc arguments evolved from earlier ad hoc arguments in response to the failure of the parousia, or are they genuine philosophical accomplishments of some kind, principles that can be held to be true regardless of what one makes of the specific historical claims around Jesus, his resurrection, and the parousia?
A couple of introductory caveats are probably in order if we seek to answer this question. A first is that historical ad hoc and transcendent revelation are not mutually exclusive—particularly if one takes the contingent world to be an arena of manifestation where the transcendent qualities of God are able to be made perceptible to the senses and intelligible to finite minds. That is, the Trinity and the Incarnation could in some sense be truths “accidentally” discovered by the historical emergence of Christianity even if Christianity’s particular interpretation of them is not ultimately true. After all, Christianity holds the same about the truths available in other religions, without conceding ultimate legitimacy to them most of the time, so Christians cannot be that upset if the same is done to them (though, of course, these are doctrines rejected by their immediate religious siblings largely on the grounds that they are derived from claims about Jesus rejected by those others).
A second caveat is that we have to be able to distinguish between philosophy of religion and its practice, including its practice in worship, that allows us to talk about the intellectual content of ideas like Trinity and Incarnation without demanding some kind of change in anyone’s ritual or moral life. Here I still think Hindus have discovered a vocabulary of lasting importance in distinguishing between karma yoga, the yoga of action, bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, and jñana yoga, the yoga of knowledge. In a very loose and non-exact way, this is analogous to the distinctions between cult, oracle, myth, mystery, and philosophy in ancient Mediterranean religion, that have a more direct relevance to the development of Ancient Judaism and Christianity. There are multiple ways of talking about and approaching the divine methodologically; some of them have to do with worship, some of them have to do with inspired utterances about the future or the true nature of the cosmos, some with stories of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, some with secret rites of initiation and purities ritual and moral, and some with reason exercised dialectically and systematically on observations of the natural, human, and even intelligible worlds of phenomena and thought. From this last chain of religiosity we even get discourses that look beyond deities—not in the sense of denying their existence but of looking to a cosmic or metacosmic framework that encompasses them, sometimes still to be referred to in the language of divinity, but only with apophatic qualifications—to ultimate reality. Singular, abstract systems that we refer to as “religions”—“Judaism,” “Christianity,” “Islam,” “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” and so on—encompass all these different avenues of approach, such that when we talk about something like the Trinity or the Incarnation, we’re not just talking about abstract concepts but about verbal tokens for interwoven threads in the tapestry of Christianity, some of them cultic, some of them oracular, some of mythic, some of them mystic, some of them philosophical.
History emerges here as a method of tracking the evolution of these different kinds of approach and of their interactions over time. Religious studies is in this sense supplements theology with theography: if we admit that we can say something meaningful, even if qualified, about God, we also have to admit that we can say something about how what we have had to say about God has changed over time. In that sense the possibility (the danger?) that theology is ad hoc is not just a Christian problem, if it’s a problem at all: it’s a problem for all religions, insofar as each one of them manifest in the world from the ground-up, not from the top-down (even and especially when they claim to), and so change as a function of time like any other human phenomenon. If we want to admit the legitimacy of faith and theology at all, then, we have to do so from within a framework that acknowledges the human experience, in all its ensconced historicity, as generally revelatory, at least in potency, and so too all human community, culture, art, scripture, and so on that makes the divine available to us. God either meets us in the limitations of our being human, including our mutability, or God doesn’t meet us at all; and that means being human is either something inherently divine, or capable of being divine, or no amount of religious magic can bridge the gap between us and God to begin with. So the terms of the ad hoc dilemma are not totally absolved by this observation, but they are clarified: for theology to touch on something eternal and transcendent, it has to provide some kind of rational account of why it can do so despite its historical origins and contingent path through time, and at a minimum, that requires beginning from a place of seeing human being in the world, and the world’s being, as an unveiling of God’s own inner life already, in some sense, such that the anthropological study of religion does not undermine its divine value but merely clarifies the manner in which the sacred has become available to our human consciousness.
Once we admit these caveats, or framing tools, if you prefer (as I do), then we can make several closely related observations about Trinity and Incarnation. The first is that both are derived from the deep well of cult and mythology in Ancient Israel and Judah from which both Judaism and Christianity drink and that both in different ways appropriate in their postbiblical traditions. Ancient Israel and Judah were not “monotheistic” but “polytheistic”—these terms are widely regarded by modern scholars as practically useless given the qualifications one has to offer to make sense of them—and worshiped the full pantheon of Canaanite deities into which they imported Yhwh, a deity of the northwestern Midianite steppe who came by caravan with the Transjordanian traders that filtered in and out of northern Canaan where the Proto-Israelites were located and who may well be the ancestors of the clans that were united by the tenth century into the Tribe and Kingdom of Judah by David and his successors. Over time, Yhwh assimilated the roles, identities, and prerogatives first of Baal, the champion deity of storms and fertility, chief viceregent and son to El, whom Yhwh also secondarily absorbed. As El, Yhwh assumed Asherah as his wife in popular Israelite and Judahite religion (it is disputed whether this was also done in the primary southern cult shrine of Jerusalem) and the other gods as his sons (b’nai El; b’nai Elohim). Over time, he assumed the qualities of these deities too: Asherah, whose cult was formally repressed in the late sixth century BCE by King Josiah and the Deuteronomic reformers, and other deities like Shemesh, the sun god; in the south, in fact, Jerusalem had originally been the Canaanite cult site to Shalim, god of the setting sun, and while Ezekiel is upset about it, the Jerusalem Temple certainly included elements of a solar cult.
These developments in Yhwh’s theography also matched his ascent from domestic god of the household and the patrilineal line, to liturgical god of the public sanctuary, to cosmic god of the universe, and they left open the position of divine son or viceregent for the person of the Judahite king, who was understood by Ancient Judahites in ways analogous to his more powerful royal peers (really, suzerains) in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The Judahite king was a divine, sacral monarch, Yhwh’s begotten son, anointed with oil and divinized by his ascent to the throne. When the Davidides lost power in 586 as a result of the Babylonian Exile, many of the qualities and functions of the Davidide kings in the preexilic period were transferred in popular religion to the person of the high priest, who subsequently increased in importance, and in the imagination of Early Jewish texts composed in this period to a variety of divine, angelic, and human beings, some past, some present, some future, some royal, some priestly, some prophetic.
The popularity of these mythemes among ordinary Jews and Jewish intellectuals waxed and waned as did the fortunes of the nation, under the successive rule of the Achaemenids, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, the Hasmoneans, and the Romans, first under the client king Herod the Great and then directly. Many, if not most, Jews of the ancient world were perfectly comfortable with their theandric link to God being the high priest in the Jerusalem Temple; some others welcomed the combination of high priestly and royal titles by the Hasmoneans, though most did not, upset that the family of Judah Maccabee laid claim to two offices neither of which they had biblical pedigree for. Some, thinking all their public institutions corrupt and their foreign rulers oppressive, looked to idealized and hoped for figures from their texts or populist leaders to offer liberation in the near future. Most, surely, practiced their ancestral customs and sought to eke out the best existence they could given the circumstances.
This is the cultic, mythic, and historical background within which claims about Jesus as a royal, divine, and otherwise exalted messiah were first articulated and made sense. The first people who encountered Jesus alive again after his crucifixion and who proclaimed him things like משיח/χριστός, κύριος, υἱός θεοῦ, σώτηρ, who imagined him as God’s co-regent and/or high priest in heaven, philosophized about him as the incarnation of God’s λόγος, and so on were people who were doing so from within a Jewish cultural matrix, itself ensconced within a wider Hellenistic cosmopolitan society and Roman administrative system where these concepts reverberated in different ways among very Hellenized Jews and non-Jews alike. But they were not, pace both Jewish and Christian scholars of previous generations seeking to find the division between Judaism and Christianity as reified systems in the first century, trying to craft a totally new mythology. They were instead drawing on traditions in Second Temple Judaism that in turn stemmed from the ruler cult of Ancient Israel and Judah, and that had myriad parallels and connection points to the cultures of their Near Eastern and Mediterranean neighbors. Some of these traditions, such as the Son of Man sequence of Daniel 7:9-14, were closer to home, probably derived in its origin from the Baal Cycle at Ugarit and successively retconned through different phases of pre-Hellenistic Yahwism and Early Judaism, such that by the first century the Ancient of Days character, originally El, was now Yhwh and the Son of Man character, originally Baal and then Yhwh, was now the divine, angelic, or human viceregent exalted by Yhwh to rule. Others, like the Wisdom tradition—derived in its sociological origins most likely from goddess worship in Ancient Israel and Judah, where Asherah was the consort of Yhwh for most Israelites and Judahites, the official cultic policy of major sanctuaries notwithstanding, and then developed literarily in postexilic texts like Proverbs, The Wisdom of Ben Sirach, The Wisdom of Solomon, and the apocalypses—were drawn from widespread Near Eastern contemplative motifs about the relationship of order and chaos in the universe and of both to human morality that, when they encountered Greek philosophy, invited creative acts of interpretatio in Jewish literature composed in Greek. Philo of Alexandria, for example, transforms the figure of Wisdom into the Logos—or, at least, demotes the feminine character of Wisdom to a secondary emanation or subordinate reality to the masculine Logos—as God’s second, his firstborn son, his chief angel, the heavenly Israel, and so on. John adopts this tradition when he describes Jesus as the Logos made flesh through the descent of God’s spirit on Jesus at his baptism by John the Baptizer (Jn 1:1-14). Postbiblical Judaism developed both of these major streams of cultic, mythic, and philosophical speculation in a variety of ways: in the Enoch and Hekhalot literature, by seeing the Son of Man as a heavenly, deified Enoch-Metatron, the Yhwh qatan or “Lesser Yhwh,” or else as a glorified Davidic messiah; in kabbalistic literature, through a complex theosophical distinction between God in God’s infinite, unattainable nature and God’s revealed, complex manifestation in, as, and beyond the material universe, within which the rabbinic Shekhinah, a feminine divine successor to Asherah and Wisdom, is re-received as in some sense the feminine divine energy with which the masculine divine energy more familiar from biblical and rabbinic literature seeks to unite (in part, late medieval Jews got this idea from their exposure to Christian devotion to the Virgin Mary). Postbiblical Jews also had mythemes about a preexisting, divine or heavenly messiah who comes down to the world (perhaps multiple times), suffers, and is glorified or exalted, by way of reappropriating the Jewish character of the ideas that created Christianity from Christians without conceding Christianity’s legitimacy.
So, these were very powerful ideas with a long pedigree in Ancient Judaism, and a long afterlife in postbiblical Judaism and Christianity (and in various ways in Islam, though that’s a more complex topic). Christianity did not suddenly hatch the notion that the one God worshiped by Jews and Christians was in some sense a unity that embraced plurality, but inherited it from preexisting traditions, and experienced it first in their worship and in their scriptures before they tried to theorize about it. We can add to this picture that for Early Christians, the deification of Jesus was not just a literary production but also an oracular and mystic event: in Early Christian communities, assemblies for worship where visions of the risen Jesus took place in the first generation gave way to a common sense of the transmission of God’s pneuma, spirit, through Jesus to the community of his disciples, and by the inspiration of the spirit Jesus’s followers both spontaneously and mechanically vocalized confessions of Jesus’s power and stature in the cosmos that in turn shaped the way they read scriptural texts; they even used these divinatory kinds of practices in the way they read scripture to begin with, coming to see in Jewish texts the paschal mystery of Jesus’s death and resurrection and then, subsequently, Jesus’s pre-incarnate role in the variety of divine bodies, intermediaries, and figures one finds in the anthology of the Hebrew Bible. Early Christians, in other words, came by their convictions honestly, from the first experience of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and glorification, in all of its raw uncertainty, to subsequent visionary experiences, auditions, and inspired utterances proclaiming him as God’s cosmic second-in-command.
It’s only subsequent to these first generations, with their charismatic ebullience and apocalyptic certainty of the coming Kingdom, that Christianity as a formal literary and intellectual tradition emerges in the communities leftover. This is as second observation, then: the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation as we know them are in some sense later attempts to make sense of the raw experience of the content of those doctrines by the apostles and the original communities. When I say “later,” I do not mean to push the subsequent development too far afield: followers of Jesus were already writing complex literary texts in the first century, and some of the people doing so were also people who experienced these kinds of “mystical” or “charismatic” powers at work in their minds and in the worlds around them, like Paul. But Paul does not give us a formal dogma of the Trinity, and he also does not give us a working mechanic of the Incarnation: these ideas as we have them are only possible once Christianity has taken a distinctively new form in a different temporal and geographic environment than the one it was born in.
Christianity’s emergence from the first-century Jesus Movement with a high Christology is partially an accident at the macro-level of the circulation of certain texts and ideas from those texts in the more educated circles of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals producing Christian literature—from Paul and the Gospels through the second and third century Apologists and early theologians—and partially an accident of which communities happened to survive with their Christologies intact from the variety of first and second century historical events in the life of Judea and the broader Roman Empire (two-and-a-half or three Jewish-Roman Wars, depending on how one thinks about the Kitos War; imperial expansion into Persia, retreat from the Persian front, and policy changes concerning citizenship; plague; etc.). What survived as Christianity is partially an accident of which Christianities happened to out-compete and out-maneuver other Christianities in the ancient Greco-Roman cities where Christianity was most firmly anchored: that is, which episkopoi, which prophets, which didaskaloi were able to form the most stable, enduring, and well-positioned networks to determine what counted as orthodoxy and orthopraxy for the most Christians. And it is partially an accident of demographic changes within Christianity, as Christianity ceased to be a primarily Jewish Movement in the late first century and became a majority gentile collegial phenomenon in which local household assemblies of Greek and Roman Christians met for prayer, charismatic experiences, teaching, discussion, and symposial eucharists. Rhetorically, these Christian communities came to think of themselves as facing not primarily the audience of the Jewish synagogue (though there continued to be Jewish followers of Jesus in the Mediterranean and the Near East caught between the synagogue and the emergent gentile Christian churches for several centuries), to which most of them were now tenuously connected or with which they were even in many places hostile, but rather the Greco-Roman world, where they had to self-present as a legitimate philosophical schola and non-threatening collegium to a Roman world that was only just beginning to realize they were there and to ask questions about what they were there to do.
A not insignificant part of why, then, we can talk about the Trinity and the Incarnation at all is because Christian communities survived that were cultically committed to the triad of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the spirit—which was fairly mainstream, even among some communities later seen as heterodox, though there was no common philosophical theory of their relationship—and which were committed to the idea that Jesus was both divine and human (again, without a common understanding of how or what that meant). They survived long enough to produce educated defenders and speculators on the meaning of these cultic practices and scriptural reading habits in a philosophical mode, who provided the architecture from which the later Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and Chalcedonian dogma of the Incarnation would be derived (folks like Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Alexander, and Athanasius of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, and so forth). These were classically educated folks (mostly men, but some women too): learned in Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and trained to utilize the common philosophical standards of the second, third, and fourth centuries in use among pagans—basically, the eclectic positions of Middle and Late Platonists—in the reading of Jewish Scripture and the emergent corpus of New Testament texts. If we’re going to have an ad hoc dilemma, let’s really lean into the contingency: it’s not just a particular time, place, and cultural setting that gave us these doctrines, nor even just the particular history of a particular religious community: it’s particular people, particular minds and voices and hands, that gave us these doctrines. It’s personal histories—of Origen growing up wanting to be a martyr and studying with Plotinus under Ammonius Saccas and reading Philo in the Catechetical Academy and fighting with his bishop and moving to Palestine, of the “Holy Family” of Makrina, Basil, and Gregory Nyssen converted by Gregory Thaumaturgus, Origen’s student, and meeting Gregory Nazianzen at school, of Evagrius of Pontus having the chance to study with them and formulate his views in conversation with all of them—that gave us Christianity as we know it, not just abstract historical simulacra.
In this, the development of Christianity’s theological tradition is not really much different than the development of Judaism before and contemporaneously with it. The history of Judaism is really a history of people making choices that have effects on other people, just like the history of anything else is. In our scriptural texts we have legendary representations of these choices in the narratives of the patriarchs and the Exodus: legends that tell us more about the values and sense of identity that motivated everyday decision-making in Late Bronze and Iron Age Israel and Judah than about the actual historical sequence by which they came to be, admittedly, but unavoidable in every parsha is the supreme weight that individual choices seem to have on so much. It’s Abraham’s choice to leave Ur, to go to Canaan, to haggle with God, to obey or disobey divine command to offer Isaac, to find Isaac a wife, Isaac’s choice to favor Esau over Jacob but then, crucially, to be deceived by Jacob into giving him the blessing as a result, the choice of these two patriarchs to fool kings they live among into taking their wives to avoid death, Jacob’s choice to repeatedly swindle his brother, his father, his uncle, and so on, that constitutes the bedrock narrative tradition of Jewish identity and has done so for millennia. It is David’s choice to usurp Saul, unite Judah as a political entity, unite Israel and Judah, and Solomon’s choice in how he runs the empire he inherited that led to the breakup of the kingdoms under Rehoboam. It is the choice of the Israelite kings among various political options that leads to their destruction by the Assyrians, the choices of the eighth, seventh, and sixth century Judahite kings that led to their temporary evasion of the same fate and eventual submission to it, the choices of exilic and postexilic prophets and community leaders to rebuild and restore Judah, Jerusalem, and the Temple in the ways they did that shaped Jewish living for centuries afterwards, the choices of the Hasmoneans and the Herodians that led out of Seleucid and into Roman rule, the choices of Jesus, the apostles, and so on that much later birthed Christianity, and the choices of the rebels in Judea that led to the fallout with Rome. And this does not even cover the impact of the choices made by those outside Israel and Judah that substantially shaped their national life and the individual experiences of their peoples.
Similarly, scribes and other intellectuals, both Jewish and Christian, made choices that led to the development of the intellectual traditions that gradually achieved dominance in both communities. These choices and the impact they had were not inevitable, historically speaking, and things could have gone very differently in both communities. For example, “monotheism” in the abstract has been treated by Jews in late antiquity, the middle ages, and modernity as a key aspect of Jewish identity and the centerpiece of Jewish faith, distinguishing it from most others. But as modern biblical scholars know, not only is it the case that the Hebrew Bible is not “monotheistic” in the sense of consistently proclaiming that only a single divine entity exists, and not only was it not the case that Ancient Jews, like other peoples, believed that all gods existed, but what traditions are being pulled here as evidence of “monotheism” as a core component of Judaism is in large part a consequence of editorial decisions made by the authors and compilers of the Hebrew Bible who were pushing a specific religious agenda in a society that did not uniformly agree with them.
Similarly, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was not “inevitable.” It was the process of the very specific curation, made by the choices of Christian leaders and intellectuals, of specific texts and ways of reading those texts in the academic climate of their time, that led to the formation of the concept of the Trinity in response to the perceived necessity of it; and even once formed, it was a disputed idea among Christians whose own meaning-making activities with the texts and methods they had received were different.
So on the one hand, the Trinity and the Incarnation are deeply rooted in pre-Christian ideas in Second Temple Judaism; on the other hand, they are clearly products of Early Christian texts, contexts, and thinkers, the victory of whose efforts could have gone differently, just as the very formation of Judaism prior to Christianity could have gone differently. That’s what it means to be contingent, after all: something could have been other than it is, an outcome is “touched” by the alternative possibilities that coexist with it. So doesn’t that mean that they are ad hoc developments—not least because their intellectual architecture was only necessary in an age after the apocalyptic fervor of the earliest generations had subsided into institutional necessity?
This leads me to a third observation, which is that the Trinity and the Incarnation are not simply drawn from cult, myth, text, and ongoing religious experience but also from philosophical reflection. Philosophy, too, has contingencies, histories, and contexts, as a human practice, but it also—and this is key—provides a ladder from the contingent to the transcendent, a way of reflecting on the nature of contingency itself that can facilitate our passage to, or at least our arrival at the threshold of, the absolute. I might phrase the difference here as one of being unconscious of one’s contingencies and conscious of them, and therefore also of their logical implications in relationship to the absolute. Religion without philosophy is pure reaction: reaction to the experience of the preternatural and absolute aspects of reality, reaction to the social need for cohesion around such experiences, reaction to the psychological needs of the human mind to ritualize our experiences and find meaning in them, reaction to the changing character of one’s community as it endures through time. But with philosophy, religion is given a language, a perspective, on its contingency that allows it to understand that contingency as an expression of what must be true of the absolute, and not merely of the spatiotemporally parochial.
So when, for example, thinkers like Clement, Origen, and the Cappadocians appropriate the work of Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Alcinous, Plotinus, Porphyry, and so on, they are on the one hand making use of that which is culturally available to them as a language to talk about the ultimate and the contingent in-relation-to the ultimate, but they also therefore are talking about the ultimate, and they are trying to interpret their specific religious traditions in the context of what reason reflecting dialectically and systematically on experience, nature, and culture can know about the ultimate. The Trinity is partly a question of how to read the data of scripture and tradition, but also partly a question about how scripture and tradition relate to reality at large, and these secondary kinds of questions drive the debates before and after Nicaea. For example, the Eunomian party held in opposition to the Nicenes that God, in order to be God, must be absolutely agenneton, “ungenerated,” and so, “God” cannot rightly be predicated of Jesus according to essence (ousia) but only metaphorically, since Jesus is, by all data of scripture and tradition, the “generated” or “begotten” Son of God. Moreover, the Eunomians were just being good Platonists: the Nous is an emanated, but still secondary, overflow of the transcendent One, but is not itself quite what it is to be the One, as something unified. On the face of it, this makes a certain degree of sense: whatever comes after the One would logically be, in some sense, the One’s effect and therefore lesser than its cause. The Nicenes countered that this reading failed both as a hermeneutic for scripture and tradition as well as in the logic of how God is capable of emanating or creating at all. First, agenneton is not something scripture predicates of God, say the Nicenes; second, if generation means creation, simpliciter, then there’s equally a problem of accounting for how God can be said to be Jesus’s Father just as there is in saying Jesus is God, because this would imply that God at some point became Father of Christ when he had not previously been, which would mean that God is subject both to time and change, something inappropriate of the divine nature on both sides of the debate. Hence, the Nicenes argued, there must be a sense in which what it is to be God pre-contains within it and is entirely manifest in both the modes of existence defined by ingeneration as well as by generation; and this is, additionally, the precondition on which God is logically capable of creating the world at all, as a derivative and modally inferior expression of the act of generation that is otherwise proper to God’s own nature as God.
Now, in that sense, fourth-century Christians came up with an ingenious way of solving several interrelated problems of theirs at once, including how to account for worship of Jesus in a philosophical context that differentiated Creator and creature as well as how to account for Jesus’s role as mediator of deifying power to human beings. But I would also suggest that they offered a genuine philosophical insight about what must be true of God in order for the created world to exist at all: that is, the power to create must in some sense be pre-contained in God’s own inner life, in the dynamic of the ungenerated and the generated, in the interchange between the Deus absconditus and the Deus relevatus. I would agree with those historians of philosophy that have suggested the novel development of the language of ousia as abstract essence and hypostasis as concrete subsistence or instantiation of that essence to be a vital contribution to the way that we talk about things: not just things in general, “treeness,” “human,” etc. but this tree, this human without eliminating a sense of the general on the one hand or reducing the significance of the individual on the other. Likewise, the Christological Controversy had the important effect of introducing an illuminating distinction between hypostasis and prosopon into the mix of philosophical conversation as the distinction between the concrete subsistence of something (hypostasis), as the particular mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos) within which that essence (ousia) occurs, and the phenomenal manifestation (prosopon) of that mode of existence in the world, which always reveals some aspect of the thing while concealing some other.
These are distinctions worked out in the minefields of contingent Christian theological disputes conditioned by historical circumstances but they are also, crucially, ways of describing reality that have much wider purchase. To distinguish between the essence of something, which is fundamentally unknowable whether we are talking about the infinite or even about any particular finite thing, and the concrete thing we experience, and the way it appears to us and is therefore available not only for our perception but also for our cognition, is simply to describe the epistemic agonia we face in our encounter with everything within and around us all the time. And as a way of distinguishing both the different subsistent modes of existence which God is as well as the details of the God-world relationship, this language seems to have an enduring value. A point of convergence between many religious and philosophical systems, after all, is that we cannot know what God is, nor can we positively describe God (kataphasis) without qualifying that which we say positively by way of negation (apophasis); but we can know that God is, what God does, and perhaps who God is by other means: by sustained reflection, for example, on nature, on history, by revelation, etc. We can know how God appears in theophany, at least, and can abstract from these appearances certain data that tell us at a minimum how God operates.
More to the point, though, I contend that Trinity and Incarnation themselves are philosophical ideas that are bigger than the Christian Tradition. Christians already handle the philosophical and religious accomplishments of their neighbors in this way—suggesting that their bigger or ultimate significance lay outside of the contours of their host traditions and are really best expressed in conjunction with some Christian idea or practice—so they can hardly complain if this point is made. It might be the case, of course, that non-Christians are not interested in the concept of the Trinity or of the Incarnation: these have traditionally been sticking points, after all, between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, with the first and third objecting to the second precisely on the grounds that both doctrines predicate inappropriate honors of Jesus and result in logical absurdities, like how one God could be three (the Qur’an, after all, accuses Christians of tritheism, as does mainstream Muslim apologetics against Christianity).
But this is, as I have written elsewhere in the dispatch, to misunderstand what the doctrine of the Trinity portends to say. Just as the Neoplatonic tradition rightly insists that the One “is not one,” that is, in the numeric sense, the Trinity is not “three” in the numeric sense either. While the divine triad of Father, Son, and Spirit in ante-Nicene Christianity certainly was a numeric trio of divine entities of cascading essential magnitude and cosmic function, such that ante-Nicene Christians worshiped one supreme God and two subordinate powers as worthy of divine honors alongside God without being God, Nicene and post-Nicene Christianity includes those powers formerly considered subordinate within the Godhead as hypostaseis, not in the sense of discrete individuals but in the sense of subsistent modes of existence (tropoi hyparxeos, again) which the one God fully, coequally, and coeternally subsists in, and which are differentiated not by their essential content but by their manner of procession. The Father, named the Father by the cultic and scriptural tradition which Christianity shares with Judaism, is God in the subsistent mode of existence as the ungenerated source which is inherently and inexhaustibly generative; the Son, named the Son by the royal and apocalyptic mythologies Christianity also shares with Judaism, is God in the subsistent mode of existence as the self-generated ground of creation; the Spirit, named the Spirit both on the grounds of cult and scripture on the one hand as well as on the ground of ancient physics and metaphysics, is God in the tertiary mode of processional existence in exchange between the modes of the ungenerated and the generated, proceeding from himself, upon himself, through himself, and back to himself, such that God is an internally complete circle, ever-moving rest and dynamic perfection.
Again, Jews and Muslims, as well as others, may prefer not to describe God or ultimate reality using this exact language, and that’s perfectly fine. The substance of the doctrine is what constitutes a real philosophical achievement, one that has analogues in other traditions, and that substance is that only something like this provides a meaningful way for God to be infinite and for the world to really, if in a qualified manner, exist from God, in God, and for God. If God is, as virtually all classically theistic traditions hold, simple, infinite, and purely actual, then the existence of the world as an entity alongside God provides a challenge for this theology, since anything alongside God would constitute a competitor on God’s ontological plane, mitigating his simplicity, his infinity, and his pure actuality. One solution to this is a nondualism that eliminates the world’s reality and suggests that it is merely illusory. This seems to do a radical injustice to our appropriate sense of the world’s significance and of our own existence and the meaning of our lives: eliminating world and self from the equation is a false solution to the problem. Another solution is a dualism that accepts the mitigated deity, but this simply raises new problems, since such a deity will also require an account of its own existence and so, inevitably, eventually, one will have to end up positing the God of classical theism anyway as a genuine origin to the world. So there has to be an intermediate sort of nondualism that successfully maintains divine simplicity, infinity, and pure actuality while also maintaining the reality, however qualified, of world and self.
The only way to do this meaningfully is if in some sense the world’s existence is a logical corollary of something already true of God, which is to say, if God’s act of creation is in some way derivative of some aspect within God’s inner life. Myriad problems emerge if we deny this principle: as pagan critics of Early Christianity acknowledged forthrightly, the Christian story of creation from the Book of Genesis, read literally, implies that God arbitrarily, voluntaristically began to create the universe at some point in time after a long time of having not created a universe, implying a deity that is mutable and subject to temporality. Only, as Philo and Origen both correctly realized, if God in some sense creates from beyond time and creates a world that is derivatively eternal—not in the absolute sense, but in a contingent, participatory sense, of an infinite succession of worlds or of a single world that experiences an endless series of successive aeons—can God be absolved from the charge of voluntarism. But equally, God must be the very ground of possibility for the world, whether bounded or not, the very hypostasis from which it stands-out (existit) as a phenomenal appearance or sub-modal form of subsistence (that is, a prosopon), or else we risk running into the same problem of trying to account for an infinite God that somehow coexists with the world. Only if the world exists from God, in God, through God, for God, and as God, in a different mode, can the world be said to exist at all with God being what God is, and this is only possible if in some sense the world’s existence manifests that which is already true of God. Hence, God the Father and God the Son; hence, brahman nrguna and brahman saguna; hence, the Unnameable Dao of Absence and the Named Dao of Presence; hence, the Ein Sof and the sefirotic body of God.
Again, one need not affirm the substance of the doctrine by the dogmatic formula of the Trinity to adhere to the basic principle, that the being, mind, and life of the world must really be siphoned (or siloed) offshoots of God in order to exist at all. This is nondualism, panentheism, idealism, and panpsychism followed through to their logical conclusions. For when one follows this logic through to this end, one also realizes that, being part of the world, there must be a way to account for God as the true hypostasis of the individual soul, of my individual conscious awareness and life-force as it exists in the world, which is seemingly in constant movement from my coming-to-be through to my passing-away. Just as there must be in God some subsistent mode of being generated from God’s self that is the ground of the world’s existence, so, too, there must be some subsistent mode of proceeding from God, through God, and back to God that is the ground of my own exitus and reditus to God, as well as the world’s. Here, again, there are numerous parallels one can use to express the idea from other traditions, ways of affirming the jñana of the Christian position without confessing bhaktically as a Christian.
Insofar as the Trinity is really a way of trying to account for the God-world relationship, then, and insofar as it is an accomplishment of philosophy whose logical content is not limited to the Christian confession, so too the Incarnation, because the moment that we talk about God and the world as a non-dual reality, a unity-in-plurality, our understanding of what the world is must change. Specifically, the world becomes unavoidably the body or mask or face or clothing or whatever metaphor one wants to use for God: the world is God, but God is more than the world; or, put differently, God is the world, but the world is not God. So whether one wants to do that by talking, as kabbalists do, about the lowest sefirah of the material universe as Shekhinah or Malkhut, or talking, as some Modern Jewish theologians have, about the kedushah of the nation of Israel and its religious customs as being a kind of “incarnation” of God among humanity (a concept Christians must surely affirm as logically prerequisite to talking about Jesus as the divine incarnation of anything), or of talking, as Sufis do, about the waḥdat al-wūjūd, any nondualist is going to have to talk about the world as in some sense God’s body, his perceptible face. Whether this is Krishna’s revelation of his universal form in Bhagavadgita XI or the Psalmist’s talk about the world as God’s “garment” (Ps 102:26) that he changes periodically or talk about nature’s Qur’an matching the textual Qur’an as the Word of God inscribed in physical form, the point in each case is that the world of things is not something other than God even while it simultaneously does not attain to being God, simply speaking.
In this sense Christians arrive at the Incarnation, not just of a divine being in the heavenly court (which is how the New Testament does present Jesus’s incarnation) but of God himself in human form, as a logical necessity of a God that nondually includes the world. And also, on these grounds, the Christian outworking of the logic about how divinity and humanity are related in the person of Christ, and therefore how divinity and the world are related in the person of Christ, can also be seen as a philosophical accomplishment that extends beyond the confines of the Christian Tradition itself.
Again, non-Christians may not wish to use these metaphysics explicitly and may even experience strong bhaktic and karmic resistance to the language of Incarnation itself, but I think there’s sufficient academic data to suggest that these reactions are more inspired by a history of negative experiences at the hands of Christians more than they are logically grounded allergies. That is to say, I think that Incarnation is going to pop up as a question any and every time someone posits a God that is the infinite source and substance of the world, because that definition of God logically forces us to ask how the identity and integrity of world and self can be maintained in relation to God. Moreover, I think Christians are not the only ones who have arrived at this observation and they’re not the only ones that have an articulate philosophical tradition on the question that can be used outside of their Tradition’s boundaries. I do not think someone has to be Hindu or Ch’an Buddhist to appreciate the metaphysics of the avatar or of Dao, Buddha Nature, emptiness, and bodhisattvic ideals, so I similarly do not think someone has to be Christian to find philosophical Christology useful.
A more serious counterpoint here would be that no single Christology currently commands the Christian heirs of Nicaea, and did not in antiquity either. A range of Christologies between the Church of the East, the non-Chalcedonian Churches, and the Chalcedonian Churches competed with one another throughout late antiquity and the middle ages, and no modern resolution has yet appeared to which everyone publicly agrees in a way that matters (that has, say, restored communion). The two dominant options, of course, were Christologies of prosopic union—in which the two ousiai or physeis of divinity and humanity, each with their appropriate hypostasis, were united by Christ in one, common, composite prosopon—and Christologies of hypostatic union, where Christ’s one hypostasis is the subject of both divine and human natures. As I argued here, here, and here, I think the by far preferable solution to this problem is to attribute the hypostatic union to the Son’s eternal, atemporal assumption of humanity which he pre-contains within himself and the prosopic union to the Son’s historical manifestation in time.
Now, what I find really important to note here is that utilizing the concept of the prosopic union actually offers a language for more than just one pivotal incarnation of the deity. It can justify, logically, why Christians worship God-as-Jesus; but it also meets together with, say, brahmanic theories of the avatars or even with Ḥasidic language about certain quasi-deified saints. It also provides the grammar that can explain our own path towards deification, however our traditions describe that path: how we, too, can unite our prosopa with the divine so as to manifest God in the world.
To briefly end where I began, historical study of Christian Origins can be ruinous for faith, and it should be iconoclastic towards those beliefs we have that are unjustified and untenable. There is a tension between the Jesus of history, the earliest communities of his followers, and what Christianity became, one that might lead us rightly to suspect that much of what Christianity is now is a kind of ad hoc apology for a failed apocalypse. There’s a level at which that’s unavoidably true. But there’s another sense in which we can see the historical trajectory of Christianity as arriving at certain truths about reality through its particular contingencies that are of lasting value no matter how we feel about Christianity itself. Christians, post-Christians, and non-Christians can all affirm at least in principle the basic concepts that undergird the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation, Christianity’s two most essential ideas, without formally confessing either one, and without becoming Christian. That means, too, that the substance of faith for billions of people throughout the world is not dependent on Christianity’s historical origins or its historical future. In confessing faith in God the Trinity and in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully Man, we can have some confidence that we tap into both a historical wellspring of numerous things that might have been otherwise, but gloriously are as they are instead, as well as the water of the Absolute that endures no matter the shape of the riverbend.
Your sweeping vision here is breathtaking in its extent, its cohesion, its particularities, and in the dignity that it recognizes in the myriad of personal choices and actions that serve as conduits for the water of the Absolute. You made me weep just a bit. Thanks on multiple counts! And to quibble, I’m still stuck on my gripe with your last post, as far as I can understand these things (which is rather limited to be sure). It seems strange to say that “Jesus thought that in the near future God would send a messianic redeemer, the Son of Man, who would bring about a resurrection of the dead, judge the nations, and rule over a restored Israel and, from Israel, over the other nations of the world” so the historical Jesus is preclude from having any concept of his own heavenly reign over all of fallen time from outside of fallen time while you also say that “the first people who encountered Jesus alive again after his crucifixion ...imagined him as God’s co-regent and/or high priest in heaven” and that “postbiblical Judaism developed ...the Enoch and Hekhalot literature, by seeing the Son of Man as a heavenly, deified Enoch-Metatron, the Yhwh qatan or ‘Lesser Yhwh,’ or else as a glorified Davidic messiah.” If all these various heavenly visions of a kingdom were available to so many people surrounding the time of Jesus Christ, why could the historical Jesus not have had a self-understanding that included himself as ruling creation as a divinized and ascended king and priest?
"God either meets us in the limitations of our being human, including our mutability, or God doesn’t meet us at all."
That's a truth to cling to.