History of Philosophy | 18 Middle and Neo-Platonism

[Thomas]

Debates about the Trinity almost always center on Christology. Once in awhile pneumatology figures in (But usually only if someone brings up the idea of Binitarianism by contrast). Almost never is Paterology mentioned.

That's a given.

It's almost as if God as he might have been known or thought of amongst the Jews, disappears or fades into the background in Christian theology.

Oh, I don't see that at all. I think scholarship shows that God Most High, the very God of Israel, was, as Hart says "was beyond all immediate contact with the created order" to the Jews and Christians of Jesus' day.

In fact, in that sense it was jesus' teaching that brought the Father close.

One of the reasons I am baffled by the concept of the trinity is to me it feels like it conceals God, even if, at least hypothetically, it is considered a way to reveal God.

It reveals God the Father in a way that surpasses all else, and in the Trinity, in union, reveals the Father intimately.

 

[Thomas]

The rest of McClellan's presentation is in much the same light.

7:49 “... so now we got John 8:58 ...”
John 8:58-59 “Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I tell you, before Abraham came to be, I AM. So they took up stones, in order to cast them at him; but Jesus was hidden and departed from the Temple [, passing right through their midst and so slipping away].”
I have dealt with the relevant ego eimi statements above, at #137.

13:22 “so it is through possession of the Divine name, the authorized bearing of the Divine name, that Jesus can say I am, can identify with it, and this is what facilitates the mutual indwelling between Jesus and God this is what allows Jesus to say I and the father are one.”
The qualification ‘can identify with it’ is weak. John 16:15 says, “All things whatsoever the Father hath, are mine.” So Jesus, being in possession of all the Father is, can say ‘I am’ with the same weight and authority ...

13:39 “one Jesus is not saying I am God Jesus is saying I am the authorized possessor and bearer of the Divine name I am God’s image or agent I speak on behalf of God on Earth ... “
Jesus does declare His divinity, just not as God the Father, but as God the Son who possesses ‘all that the Father has’ – His essence, His substance and His name, and to Jesus alone is it ‘given’ (although made known to Moses) ... and there’s a huge distinction between ‘image’ and ‘agent’, in that anyone can be an agent of God – angel, prophet, priest, king – but the image belongs to the Son alone.

His ‘divine image’ exegesis I find questionable, in the light of Leviticus 26:1 “Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the LORD your God.”
Stones were raised by the Jews as memorials and markers, but not as Divine Images – that was pagan practice.
Neither architecture of the Temple nor or the Ark of the Covenant are a ‘Divine Image'.

15:44 “to see me is to see God and we see Thomas realized this in John 20:28 where he falls down and says my Lord and my God he finally gets it”
Thomas says “ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou” – I offer Hart’s commentary on the text:
“Here, Thomas addresses Jesus as ‘ho theos’, which unambiguously means ‘God’ in the absolute sense. He addresses him also as ho kyrios, again with the honorific article, which also happens to be the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Adonai in the Septuagint, the preferred textual circumlocution for God’s unutterable name, the tetragrammaton (YHWH). Thomas’s words here, then, appear to be the final theological statement of the Gospel at its “first ending.” (Hart agrees with other scholars that Chapter 21 was a later addendum.)

In short, I find Hart's reading of John more insightful than McClellan's, which too readily glosses over difficult terrain.