The True Meaning of the Nicene Decisions

As I have mentioned before, some contemporary critics of trinitarian thought, especially as it comes down to us in its fourth century forms, accuse the Church fathers of capitulating to Hellenistic presuppositions which effectively sever God from the world and from the realities of lived history.  Robert Jenson makes just the opposite claim in his Systematic Theology, which is well worth reading:

"As nearly instinctive as they were, the Nicene decisions are the church's most decisive dogmatic achievement to date: they clearly differentiate the God of the gospel from the God of that culture through which the gospel entered its world mission, and in some descent from which the author and most readers of the work still live.  Nicea teaches dogmatically: the true God needs, and the gospel provides, no semidivine mediator of access to him, for the gospel proclaims a God who is not in fact distant, whose deity is identified with a person of our history; antiquity's struggle to overcome a supposed gulf between deity and time is discovered to be moot in light of the gospel.  Vice versa, any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God "himself" from this person, from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now excercises, has, according to Nicea, no place in the church."

-Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume One, 103

Comments

[Mitch]

That is, Robert Jenson claims that the Nicene decisions do not "sever God from the world and from the realities of lived history" as some contemporary critics believe?

[Zossima]

I certainly wouldn't contend that Nicene was intended to or even remotely unintentionally accomplished the severing of God "from the world..." That took a fair amount of time. I do agree that the severing that ultimately occurred was largely an adoption of Hellenistic presuppositions, though. But that is because it was a Hellenistic world. If Jesus had born in China, then the Church that emerged would inevitably have adopted Confucian suppositions. I've found in my own thinking that the return to the Nicene forms of Trinitarian thought have been very liberating. Yet I also try to avoid the monarchical notions of Trinity that can be part of that.

[millinerd]

Jaroslav Pelikan, as did T.F. Torrance in his lectures on the Nicene Creed.

Nicea was a transformation of Greek thougth patterns, not a surrender to them. Arius, on the other hand may have surrendered.

[millinerd]

What I meant to say was that Jaroslave Pelikan made the exact same argument in his Gifford lectures, as did T.F. Torrance in his lectures on the Niceen Creed.

[millinerd]

...and I meant to spell "Jaroslav" and "Nicene" right too.

[refrigerated trailers]

The decision is a civilized move.