Marcionites, Early Christians, and Knowledge of God

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-169
Author(s):  
Claire Hall
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Divine Knowledge ◽  
The World

The Marcionite movement of the mid 2nd century rejected the Old Testament God, claiming that he was separate from the God of Christ. The Marcionite movement posed difficult questions about prophecy: what it was, who had access to it, and what we could know from it. Particularly, the Marcionites questioned the long distant past of the Israelite prophets, throwing doubt on their legitimacy and on whether they could be relied on as sources of true divine knowledge. But they also prompted discussions on a number of related theological issues: in particular, what does it mean to know God and Christ? What does it mean to know the world through prophecy? And what can we say about God in a world in which scripture is not the basis of sound knowledge? This chapter tracks these two closely related strands, examining Marcionite theological views and how they fit into the broader picture of pagan Greek and early Christian epistemology. It provides the context in which to understand Origen’s anti-Marcionite writings and his epistemology, both issues of prime importance for understanding his view of prophecy.

“They Saw What They Said They Saw”: Sense Knowledge in Early Christian Polemic

1988 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Hauck
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Divine Knowledge ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Common Shape

A curious parallel exists between two early Christian discussions of prophetic or divine knowledge. Both deal with the Christian problem of sense knowledge about the divine in a thought world dominated by Platonic thinking: how can Christians base their knowledge of the divine upon the reports of the apostles who claim to have seen God in a human shape? The first of these discussions arises from criticisms from outside; Celsus, the second-century Platonist critic of Christianity, calls the Christians a carnal race who say that God is corporeal and has a human form, and complains, “How are they to know God unless they lay hold of him by sense-perception?” (C. Cel. 7.27, 37). The second comes from within the Christian camp, and is to be found in the Clementine Homilies. In this rather enigmatic text Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, accuses Peter in his reliance upon his apostolic experience of “introducing God in a shape,” and opposes to apostolic sense knowledge his own visionary experiences (Hom. 17.3). The examination of these two texts demonstrates that in their common terms and the common shape of their arguments the issue of the knowledge of the apostles was common in Christian polemics. It was also a problem for philosophically minded Christians who would prefer to place the knowledge of God, even if historically mediated by Jesus, in the intelligible knowledge of the soul, rather than in the senses.

Creation

2019 ◽  
pp. 511-524
Author(s):  
Paul M. Blowers
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sacred History

Early Christian interpretation of Scripture on the theme of creation not surprisingly gave considerable attention to the Genesis account of the origins of the world, in part to counter the claims of Graeco-Roman cosmology, but more importantly to expound the latent theological meaning of the many details of the biblical cosmogony. But patristic exegetes were also keen on the fact that ‘creation’ in the Bible implied far more than beginnings; indeed, it designated the whole economy (oikonomia) of the Creator’s ongoing relation to the creation as set forth in sacred history and as requiring the further interpretative lenses of Christology, soteriology, and eschatology. Early Christian interpreters plumbed a wide variety of Old Testament texts beyond Genesis (especially the Psalms, Deutero-Isaiah, and the Wisdom literature). In their New Testament commentary they focused on such motifs as the subjection of creation to ‘vanity’, the work of Jesus Christ in recapitulating God’s creative purposes, and the eschatological renewal and transformation of the created universe in its relation to human salvation.

scholarly journals Retrospectively-Historical Analogies are in the Liturgical Texts Sanctified to Saint Vladimir the Great

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Владимир Михайлович Кириллин
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The World ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
The Church

В статье рассматриваются встречающиеся в посвящённых великому Киевскому князю Владимиру Святославичу богослужебных текстах ретроспективно-исторические аналогии как характеризующие его личность и деяния элементы рефлексии о нём. В итоге исследователь приходит к выводу о том, что древнерусские гимнографы, осмысливая и воспевая посредством исторических параллелей святость великого Киевского князя Владимира, были разносторонне изобретательны: они стремились и к расширению круга ретроспективных образов, и к закреплению и даже некоторому развитию связанной с ними семантики, так что под их пером Креститель Руси обрёл устойчивые черты подобия либо ветхозаветным провозвестникам грядущего Царя и Спасителя мира, либо новозаветным свидетелям жертвенной проповеди распятого и воскресшего Сына Божия, либо раннехристианским приверженцам основанной Им Церкви как вместилища Истины и собрания верных. The article discusses retrospective-historical analogies in the liturgical texts devoted to the great Kiev Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich of liturgical texts as elements of reflection about him that characterize his personality and actions. As a result, the researcher comes to the conclusion that the Old Russian hymnographers, comprehending and singing the holiness of the great Kiev Prince Vladimir by means of historical parallels, were versatile inventive: they sought to expand the range of retrospective images, and to consolidate and even develop some semantics associated with them, so that, under their pen, the Baptist of Russia acquired stable similarity features either to the Old Testament heralds of the coming Tsar and Savior of the world, or to New Testament witnesses of the sacrificial preaching order and risen Son of God, or the early Christian adherents he founded the Church as the repository of truth and faithful congregation.

Scripture, Prophecy, and Knowledge of Christ in Origen

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-191
Author(s):  
Claire Hall
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Knowledge Of Christ ◽  
Somatic Sense ◽  
The Trinity

This chapter examines why Origen focuses closely on Christ and what it means for understanding prophecy. It argues that Origen’s focus on Christ can be understood as a response to the challenges of Marcionism. Earlier chapters examined somatic prophecy: that is to say, predictions of the future. Early Christian writers interpreted Old Testament prophecies as predictions of Christ, and doing so was an important anti-Marcionite strategy. However, christological prophecies were not only read in a somatic sense, that is, as predictions of Christ’s incarnate life. Many verses in the Bible were also read as pneumatic prophecies of Christ not as an incarnate human in time, but as the second person of the Trinity, outside time. As Origen claims, prophecies of this kind can ‘teach much theology’, functioning as pneumatic revelations of Christ as Logos and of God’s triune being. In answering the Marcionites’ claims that Old Testament prophecies were unreliable, Origen had to formulate positions on scripture’s epistemological status and also on how scripture relates to knowledge of God. This chapter therefore examines both Origen’s explicit response to the Marcionites, but also his notions of time, inspiration, and revelation, and examines a case study of John the Baptist as a prophet who unites the three senses of prophecy. It concludes that Christ is at the centre of Origen’s thought about prophecy, as the ultimate content of all somatic, psychic, and pneumatic prophecy.

Eschatology in the Old Testament

1951 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-362
Author(s):  
G. A. F. Knight
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

The Hebrews had an ineradicably “whole” view of life and the universe. We Westerners, whose educational system rests upon the assumption of the “Greeks” that matter and spirit are separate entities, find it hard to think as the Old Testament thinks. Plato was not the first of the philosophers to dissociate the realm of ideas from the realm of things, since some of the Ionian philosophers before him had already conceived that truth is the truth of propositions. One result of such a dichotomy was the conception that matter or things are not so important or even so real as are ideas; it is the study of the world of ideas, or of the world of spiritual values, which primarily leads mankind to a knowledge of God.

The Early Church and War

1946 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland H. Bainton
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Church ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Subsequent Investigation ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Church

The attitude of the early church toward the problem of participation in warfare has been not a little studied and controverted. The data with regard to participation and the attitude toward it have been assiduously compiled by a series of investigators among whom four may be mentioned for their distinctive and permanent contributions. Adolf Harnack in his Militia Christi pointed out that the early Christians rejected the militia of the world in favor of the militia of Christ. In theory the Church was pacifist until the time of Constantine though in practice some Christians were in the legions. James Moffatt in the course of a fruitful survey called attention to the shift in early Christianity from marital to martial metaphors. Whereas in the Old Testament infidelity was called adultery, in the New Testament and the early church it is described as desertion. Such militant terminology could be used by the early Christians “without the slightest risk of misconception” because their pacifist principles were so well known. C. J. Cadoux in The Early Christian Attitude to War set the entire problem in the broad context of theological and political thinking. His work remains the indispensable point of departure for all subsequent investigation. Leclercq supplied in French translation the recorded acts of the soldier martyrs and the texts of the extant inscriptions which mention Christians in the army.

The Concept of Hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Wisdom Tradition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Today scholars still struggle to apprehend the meaning of hebel (vanity) in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It has become recognized that Old Testament theologians like Walter Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and Ronald Clements did not essentially integrate the Wisdom Tradition of ancient Israel into the development of their theologies. In his Tyndale lecture on the Old Testament of 1965, David Hubbard argued for a new sensitivity to the relationship that must exist between covenant and wisdom in the community of faith. A. Graeme Auld has insisted that the alienation of wisdom from covenant traditions has caused such acute problems in understanding the Old Testament that we are in danger of not grasping at all the relation between the Word of God and the Word of Man. These problems may be linked not only to the question about why the Book of Ecclesiastes was allowed into the Canon of Israel, but also to the very hearing we claim to possess of the revelation of the Word of God in the world and the way the world has actually been made to be. All this should tell us that the significance of the concept of hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes requires a real clarification of profound consequence for our knowledge of God in the world.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

scholarly journals Eastern Church Fathers on Being Human—Dichotomy in Essence and Wholeness in Deification

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 575
Author(s):  
Olga Chistyakova
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Byzantine Church ◽  
God's Image ◽  
Maximus The Confessor

The article traces the formation of Eastern Christian anthropology as a new religious and philosophical tradition within the Early Byzantine culture. The notion “Patristics” is reasoned as a corpus of ideas of the Church Fathers, both Eastern and Western. The term “Eastern Patristics” means the works by Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, who in the theological disputes with the Western Church Fathers elaborated the Christian creed. Based on an analysis of the texts of Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, the most important provisions of Eastern Patristics are deduced and discussed, which determined the specificity of Christian anthropology. In this context, different approaches of the Eastern Fathers to the explanation of the Old Testament thesis on the creation of man in God’s image and likeness and the justification of the duality of human essence are shown. Particular attention is paid to considering the idea of deification as overcoming the human dualism and the entire created universe, the doctrine of the Divine Logoi as God’s energies, and the potential elimination of the antinomianism of the earthly and Divine worlds. The article reflects the anthropological ideas of the pre-Nicene Church Father Irenaeus, the non-canonical early Christian work The Shepherd of Hermas, and the teachings on the man of the classical Eastern Patristics period by Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor.

scholarly journals Humans created God in their image? An anthropomorphic projectionism in the Old Testament

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndikho Mtshiselwa ◽  
Lerato Mokoena
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
History Of ◽  
Old Testament Studies

The Old Testament projects not only a Deity that created the world and human beings but also one that is violent and male. The debate on the depiction of the God of Israel that is violent and male is far from being exhausted in Old Testament studies. Thus, the main question posed in this article is: If re-read as ‘Humans created God in their image’, would Genesis 1:27 account for the portrayal of a Deity that is male and violent? Feuerbach’s idea of anthropomorphic projectionism and Guthrie’s view of religion as anthropomorphism come to mind here. This article therefore examines, firstly, human conceptualisation of a divine being within the framework of the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism. Because many a theologian and philosopher would deny that God is a being at all, we further investigate whether the God of Israel was a theological and social construction during the history of ancient Israel. In the end, we conclude, based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, that the idea that the God of Israel was a theological and social construct accounts for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document