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| Theological Terminology | | Date Created: Aug 10, 2005, 09:39 AM |
Last week I read a soon-to-be published essay by Mark Horne that has been percolating in my head every since I read it. One of the points Mark made was that the traditional theological terminology that we are so comfortable with in our isolated ecclesiastical subcultures has little or no meaning anymore in the world outside of the church. Even cherished words like "salvation" and "redemption" are so esoteric to be virtually worthless in the modern world. Related to this is the fact that these words have now become technical terms in our tradition and often function in ways that the biblical authors never intended.
I'll let you wait for Mark's essay for the whole argument. One application of Mark's thesis, however, is surely that we must repudiate our love-affair with Greek and Latin vocabulary and categories in theology. This must be so if we are to do theology for our generation.
And yet, I have heard learned Christians argue that the glories of traditional dogmatic and systematic theology in the Christian tradition has as its foundation "classical" culture and languages. Apparently some think that without the rock-solid foundation of Greek philosophical categories and the precision of the Latin language, Christian theology would have never blossomed. Moreover, the knowledge of Greek and Latin (and of "classical" culture) is indispensable for developing a properly tuned Christian mind.
This kind of formulation makes me real uncomfortable. What goes along with this is the notion that Greek and Latin terms are indispensable for the church. We just can't do theology faithfully without speaking in Latin, or at least throwing around Latin phrases and Latin-derived philosophical terminology. I think not. Outside of the classroom all such phrases and terminology ought to be as aqua et igni interdictus.
This theological vocabulary was no doubt helpful in earlier historical situations, but if they continue to be used for too long, they come with a price. They mean nothing in themselves. Homoousios or perichoresis, for example, only have meaning within a particular theological community and that because of a particular ecclesiastical history with its own idiosyncratic controversies. All of these Greek and Latin terms were helpful only insofar as they were used by the church to point to the reality for which they were meant to serve – that is, the reality of God in Christ genuinely revealed by the Spirit in the Scriptures. (BTW, I highly recommend Richard A. Muller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms as an excellent reference work.)
When the early church fathers were at their best Greek and Latin terminology was used by them in such a way that the new reality of God gave to these terms radical new meaning – a meaning oriented around the new foundational reality of the Triune God. They assimilated the terminology of their day (how else were they to communicate?) in order to give it a very different slant within a specifically Christian frame of reference and understanding. That they could not and would not create a new language needs no explanation. That some of the old Hellenism would peek through in the terminology they used was simply inevitable (and they are not to be blamed for it). For the early Christian theologians the reality of the Triune God had the effect of setting all human understanding and life upon a new basis altogether disparate from that on which Greek religion, culture, and philosophy rested.
Charles Norris Cochrane makes this point about Augustine's break-through understanding of the nature of true personhood in his wonderful book Christianity and Classical Culture (chapt. 11). Even though Augustine began with the old philosophical questions, soon not just the old answers, but even the old questions were transcended. The reality of the Christian God turns everything upside-down. The reality of God in Christ revealed in the Scriptures is alone epistemologically foundational for Christian systematics and a new philosophy ("our philosophy," as Augustine called the new wisdom).
That the reality of God in Christ somehow depends upon classical civilization is a very dangerous idea. God's self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, re-generates the entire foundation and structure of human knowledge and life. No one ever said and did what Jesus said and did. No Greek philosopher ever conceived of any such things. With the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit the Trinitarian revelation of God is experienced and known as something new, something which never even crossed the minds of Greek and Roman sages. There is something so radically different here, so world-transforming in it's significance that it creates a new situation in human existence and history and generates new ways of thinking and speaking about God and the world. Even ordinary terms like "Father", "Son", "being", "person", "word", etc. were radically altered in the mind of the church fathers as they grappled with new extra-Hellenic ways of thinking.
Of course, there was some point of contact between the Hellenic culture and the church's new way of speaking, but it was only a existential and practical one. There is no sense in which the church could found or ground the Christian understanding of God and the world on anything in Greek culture and philosophy.
Greek and Latin terms are fully dispensable in the modern world. The reality of God in Christ expressed in the language of our day is not. |
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