What we have in Gregory of Nazianzus is a specific instance of an individual capable of dismantling the arguments of others, in such a way, that they are left wondering what they meant in the first place. This is central to how Gregory plays with arguments concerning the unity of the Trinity. He shows how the use of metaphor gets confused with a lived reality of the Trinity. Although much of Gregory’s concern is with how God is not to be conceived, his conjectures send the reader out into categories beyond exacting ontological conclusions.[1] He is eastern in his understanding of humanity and the limits of human estimations we might say.[2] He is careful then in using Scripture to estimate what he is proposing, but certainly understands, there is a rule to be read with that comes together in philosophical categories not immediately perceived to biblical writers. All this to say that I think if one was to pick up a singular strand in Gregory of Nazianzus’ thinking on the Trinity one would do well to consider Gregory’s use of ‘being’ and how that use leads us to think of the Godhead. But further than this, I intent to describe Gregory’s dismissal of metaphor and promotion of a way of thinking that takes the distinctiveness of God as serious as the Being itself.
METAPHORIC FAILINGS
Often when one is trying to describe love, justice, mystery, beauty and with them God—they are throne quickly into categories of the natural world to explain just what they mean by what they think. However, what they think and what they mean have a real difference, especially when one is ignorant to the fact that they are using metaphoric language to describe ‘reality’ and ‘being’ beyond what is simply understood in synonymic language. It seems clear that Gregory scolds those who would simply assume that birds are begotten like Jesus was.[3] It is certain then, when Gregory leans into dismantle the odd assumption he does so with the Scripture in mind. He asks the question then, “For what have you known among your own a virgin mother of God?” The metaphor of begotten needs then certain guidelines to make itself useful. It seems Gregory sees the Scriptures a resource, but also, the distinctiveness of the Jesus. Jesus is not, in Gregory’s estimation something or someone that simply happens, like a bird happens, but rather someone who is. In a definitive sense it is the humanity of Jesus and his sharing in the Godhead that makes him the cause of misunderstanding. It is as if he says to his opponents, “Birds don’t have virgin mothers and are not God, nice try.” It is not good enough for Gregory to liken the work of God to something that in its very nature (the birds) is the work of God. This perhaps is how the limiting idea of Jesus’ atonement was born out of Gregory’s words, “what has not been assumed, has not been healed.”[4] Gregory is far to exacting for the modern thinker who is to see God in process terms. Gregory’s appraisal of metaphoric failings has a deep critique of what is assumed in these conversations. The fact that identity and difference show up in nature does not mean that the world is some how to be equated to God’s being and our participation in God’s being.[5] Sam Powell interestingly makes this his case for how the Divine life has implications for human activity and ethical resolve. Gregory might ask him if his God were science rather than Jesus, who is a specifically odd instance in the nature of things that have been. The implications are clear in Gregory’s approach to talking about the Trinity—God’s ontology is not a thing to be explained in metaphor, but rather it must be seen in ontological categories. This sounds redundant, but perhaps this is what the Scriptures were on to in the first place.
BEGINNING OF BEING
It is interesting the way Gregory understands time as a sort of referent for human interest into God’s self. We have beginnings in time, in which we are brought into the world of existence. The temptation at this junction would be to assume a Platonic view of the universe and see God is the ultimate ideal or form that once existed in memory and then came into existence with time, as it is assumed happens with humans. It is that Gregory’s opponents assume the same categories for God as they do humans, even in language of beginnings. And so they are less Platonic and more concerned with how to order the beginning of the Divine. This assumes of course that the begotten Son was from a begotten Father and that this sequence is important in understanding the matter. The system however doesn’t seem to hold God or what happened in Jesus. It seems to actually get in the way of coming to grip with what God is. Gregory exposes that oddity to all of this by sampling a Psalm with the same interpretive questions—it is clear that the question makes no sense. Again however, this is related and easily exposed by Gregory because he sees the limits of metaphorical language in God-talk and brings philosophical tools and Scriptural resources to bare. The punch here, however, is in ontological concerns to which Gregory focuses, giving little credence to the functionality of the metaphysical claims about God.[6] For example, if in Christ only (who is man not woman) what is to be assumed and what are the implications for creation, and if we are to be critical, the woman archetype? It seems that if we were to ask this question Gregory would expose our limited imagining scope of what is assumed into the God-man. He would show, certainly how Adam functions in Scripture to be both connected to woman but also the ground and that the way we assume God assumes is probably inadequate.
The sense of what Gregory seems to convey after frustrating the very questions we assume concerning the beginnings of Father and Son, material or non, are that the questions (the very starting points) are like sand, not rock.[7] He invites the thinker to get past the “earth bound and material mentality”[8] not to dismiss the human but to explore great implications for God—why it is God exists as God is. This argument has a circular movement to it, as Gregory intents—to point the thinker back to the being of God and to only conclude that if it is that the Father is from before being, it is that Son shares in that glory.
THICK DESCRIPTION
Moving toward a conclusion Gregory of Nazianzus aims to think more fully with Scripture, not as an afterthought, but rather to sum up and land what it is he is saying and questioning. To talk well of the Trinity and how it is God holds together in the Scripture, the thoughtful theologian would do well to see just how Gregory narrates the drama of the Son.[9] Christ is the one that shares in the description that both the Old Testament and New offer of God. Gregory reads though Christ to catch this image. It is certain that the point Gregory is making is that Jesus does not function on his own, separately from the Trinity as some kind of moral exemplar. And more fully, Gregory is seeing Jesus caught up in the actions of God. Not simply in ontological terms but from the way the text runs—right up to the tree to which he is crucified.
And so, to talk and think with Gregory of Nazianzus, as it relates to God’s being, is to assume that God in Jesus is acting in a distinctive way—outside and inside the bounds of reality to bring about something that is outside and inside the categories of human understanding. This is why the metaphorical games simply fall on their face rather quickly and why the ontological significance of the Christ event has to be spoken of in unity with the Father, who, before time and the tactility of being, was and will be. There is little doubt that Gregory extends the thinker’s idea of God while getting ones mind to think out what the Trinitarian implications are concerning what we think of God—who we make God out to be.
[1] Gerald Bray, “The Church Fathers and Biblical Theology,” Out of Egypt, vol. 5 Scripture and Hermeneutics Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 29.
[2] William Rusch, The Trinitarian Controversy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1980), 136.
[3] Ibid., 133.
[4] Bray, 29.
[5] Samuel Powell, Participating in God: Creation and Trinity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003), 61.
[6] Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992), 30-39.
[7] Rusch, 137.
[8] Ibid., 139.
[9] Rusch, 143-47.
