Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)
2012 / 3-4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Martien E. Brinkman: Az igazvoltról és a gonoszról alkotott fogalmaink isteni transzcendenciája
He Came to his Own 2. God’s hands If God is eternal and the world is becoming, how is it possible to say that both interact? How can an eternal Being even create transient beings? The problem of the relation of being and becoming has haunted Greek philosophy from its very beginning. The church father Irenaeus has a simple answer to this problem: it is because God is acting, for God has hands, namely the Son and the Spirit.9 God is not a Deus otiosus without any motion. On the contrary, acting belongs to God’s very identity. This God is the living God, as the prophets taught. Irenaeus likes the metaphor of the Son and the Spirit as God’s hands. They are the way God is acting. They are God’s own hands. Therefore they are not different beings, and thus there are not three Gods. When my hands act it is I myself who acts. When the Son and the Spirit act it is the very same God who is acting as the Father is acting. It is precisely because the Father is living and acting that they act. The doctrine of Trinity is not an unsolvable mystery but an expression of the belief that God is a living God, who creates, cares, saves, makes alive. It is the translation of the belief of the prophets into Greek language. It is not a philosophical construct as the solution of the philosophical problem of being and becoming but an expression of the experience of Israel and early Christianity: God is acting, interfering in human affairs. God gives victory to his people, and God gives salvation through the death and resurrection of Christ, through his own coming into the world, and by his indwelling in human beings through his Spirit. Athenagoras stresses the eternity of God the Creator, and Irenaeus God’s acting in the Son and the Spirit. Both belong intrinsically together in Christian faith.10 3. To his own Irenaeus pushes the Christological interpretation of creation further. Because Christ is God’s acting presence to the world, the world is Christ’s own creation. This becomes Irenaeus’ core argument against the Gnostics and against Marcion. Christian Gnostics taught that Christ saved people from a lower level existence in the material world, and Marcion considered Christ as a stranger God who saved human beings form the creation of a lower demiurge. If this were true, argues Irenaeus, Christ would be a thief.11 Christ would be taking creations of a demiurge for himself, I Irenaeus, Against the Heresies IV, Preface 4; IV,20,1; V,6,l; V,28,4. 10 Athenagoras refers to God’s acting in the Spirit and the Son also (Plea 10) and Irenaeus also claims God’s eternity in contrast to created transitory being (The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching 4; see also Fragment 33). II Against heresies V,2,1: ‘And vain likewise are those who say that God came to those things which did not belong to Him, as if covetous of another’s property; in order that He might deliver up that man who had been created by another, to that God who had neither made nor formed anything, but who also was deprived from the beginning of His own proper formation of men. The advent, therefore, of Him whom these men represent as coming to the things of others, was not righteous; nor did He truly redeem us by His own blood, if He did not really become man, restoring to His own handiwork what was said [of it] in the beginning, that man was made after the image and likeness of God; not snatching away by stratagem the property of another, but taking possession of His own in a righteous and gracious manner.’ See also Against heresies 111,11,2; IV,18,4; V,18,l. 2012/3-4 SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 103
