Ontology and Exegesis

During the tumultuous fourth century when it seemed everyone in the Church was fighting everyone else and Arians and Orthodox (to use modern terms) were going at it hammer and tong, one of the weapons used in those debates was the Bible.  All the arguing parties called themselves “orthodox” and “catholics”; all of them said they believed in the Holy Trinity (i.e. all could read Matthew 28:19) and all said they believed in “Christ our God” (since the term had been around since St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his letters at the beginning of the second century).  The question was: what did it mean to describe Christ as “God”?  Was He truly divine or just sort of divine by participation?  What precisely was the nature of His divinity?  All the parties doing the arguing said that the Bible supported their views and not the views of their adversaries.

         Thus it was that Arius (who denied the full divinity of Christ and said that God created the Word before time began) triumphantly pointed to Proverbs 8:22. In that chapter Wisdom describes herself as being with Yahweh when He made the earth.  The chapter is not philosophy but poetry and it calls its hearers to hearken to the wisdom contained in the Law because it was through such wisdom that everything came to be.  The Law was not simply a cultural artefact; it was transcendent and in keeping it one lived in harmony with nature and with nature’s Creator.  A Taoist would have called the Law an expression of the Tao, something that operates everywhere and is the mother of the universe. 

         All parties in the fourth century Christological disputes agreed that the description of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22f referred to the pre-incarnate Word through which God made the world (see 1 Corinthians 1:30).  That allowed Arius to play his trump card: in the Greek Septuagint version of the text Wisdom declares that “The Lord created me [Greek ektise] as the beginning of His ways for His works”.

         “There!” said Arius, slamming the book closed.  “See?  The Lord created the Word before the world began.”  It was a bit embarrassing for St. Athanasius and the supporters of Nicea.

         The problem was that all the parties were scrutinizing the ancient texts for ontology, an explanation of the interior nature of what existed— a very Hellenistic and philosophical thing to do.  They could only with difficulty realize that such philosophical notions were foreign to Hebrew thought.  The ancient Hebrews thought in term of function, not ontology.  How you functioned and acted revealed what sort of person or thing you were.  Thus, for the Hebrews, a god was truly a god (ontologically speaking) if it functioned like a true god.  The Psalmists and the Prophets declared that the gods of the pagans did not act like true gods and so they weren’t true gods.  What then were they, ontologically speaking?  The ancient texts mostly didn’t care.  Were they demons? Phantoms? Non-existent?  The prophets were content to vilify them with rude labels (such as gillulim, “dung balls”).

         That means that a true exegesis of Proverbs 8:22 has nothing to say about the ontology of the Wisdom through which Yahweh created the world.  Its sole point was that it was wisdom— the wisdom found in the Law— that brought one into touch with transcendence and through which one lived in harmony with the universe.  Frustrating as it might have been for fourth century disputants combing through the pages of Scripture to find ammo, that’s how it was.

         Another example: Isaiah 53:8 which described the Suffering Servant, which all agreed was a reference to Christ.  In the fourth century a number of bishops wanted to reject the Nicene teaching that the Son was eternally generated or begotten from the Father.  For the Arians, the term “only-begotten Son of God” meant that the Son was begotten/ created/ came into being once as a single event, before time began, which in turn meant that the Son was not truly divine since He had a beginning.

          They met at the city of Sirmium in 357 A.D. and produced a statement which forbade any discussion of the Son’s generation. It was enough to declare, they said, that the Son was “like the Father”.  Details of about eternal ontology (such as generation) were to be avoided from now on.  Nicene talk about the eternal generation (and full divinity) of the Son was therefore off the table.

         They found a text to justify their prohibition: Isaiah 53:8 which read, “Who shall declare his generation [Greek genea]?”  “See?” they said.  “This text says that no one can know things like the Son’s generation.  We therefore should not even try and should not talk about it.”

         Once again, this text says nothing about ontology.  The words refer not to the Servant’s origin but to his descendants: he was cut off and killed and so left no descendants to declare or enumerate.  A determination to find one’s doctrine in the Bible ironically resulted in a misreading of the Bible’s meaning. 

         One final example, this one yet another text used by the Arians.  In John 14:28 Christ says, “the Father is greater than I”.  This text provided much glee in the Arian camp who regarded it as proof that the Word was not co-equal or co-eternal or con-substantial with the Father for, as the text clearly said, the Father was greater than the Son— for them, ontologically greater.

         I suggest, however, that once again our Lord’s words here have nothing to do with ontology (see here for more).  For consider the context: our Lord was speaking to His apostles in the midst of a dangerous situation when His adversaries were seeking to arrest Him and have Him killed.  Our Lord then tells the apostles that He will be leaving them and going away.  This was horrible and catastrophic news:  was He abandoning them and fleeing the country in their hour of need?  In that situation the apostles would have cared less than nothing about matters of ontology, partly because they were Jews and not Greeks but mostly because they were traumatized and upset at the thought of Him leaving them.

         So then, if not talking about His eternal ontological relationship with the Father, what could His statement mean?  It meant that although He could be surrounded and arrested, the Father could not.  He might be defeated on the cross (as men judged defeat) but the Father’s purposes could not be defeated.  The Father was greater than He was in that the Father could not be overcome by the Sanhedrin’s soldiers.

         We see the same thought in John 10:29 where Christ said that the Father was “greater than all”.  Here Christ was saying that His adversaries might be able to excommunicate His followers and cast them out of the synagogue, but they could never take out of the Father’s protecting hand.  Here as well the Father’s greatness consisted of His power to fulfil His purposes through the ministry of Jesus.

         So, what is the lesson to be learned from all this Arian exegetical stupidity?  Just this: to rightly understand the Scriptures we must first place the texts in their original historical context and let them speak to us from there— whether it answers the questions we want to ask it or not.  Wrenching the text from its original context, pressing it into alien service, and insisting it answer questions its original authors never considered asking is rarely wise.  Thus the old exegetical saying: “A text without a context is a pretext”.

Humility requires us to listen attentively to what Scripture says in its original context. Arius erred because he was determined that the Bible should say what he wanted it to say and so he read his own concerns into the sacred text.  That is not the way forward. We must rather read the Bible on our knees to find what is actually there.