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Response to Brian Daley and Paul Gavrilyuk on The Unity of Christ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

Christopher A. Beeley
Christopher A. Beeley*
Affiliation:
Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, [email protected]
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Extract

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues for their careful attention to my work, and for the invitation to respond to their comments in the pages of the Scottish Journal of Theology. It is a privilege to participate in such a conversation among friends and fellow scholars.

Keywords

Athanasius of Alexandriacommunicatio idiomatumdivine sufferingdivination/deificationJesus Christ/Christologyunity of Christ
Type
Response
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 356 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2015 

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References

1 This exchange first took place at a joint session of the AAR Eastern Orthodox Study Group and the SBL Development of Early Christian Theology Unit in Baltimore in Nov. 2013. My thanks are due as well to the other panellists, Oliver Crisp, Stephen Fowl and George Hunsinger, to Mark Weedman, who organised the panel, and to Iain Torrance, who offered to publish these papers here.

2 Gavrilyuk, Paul L., The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: OUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Beeley, Christopher A., Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: OUP, 2008), pp. 116–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim.

4 See Russell, Norman, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 337Google Scholar, on the rare Christian uses of apotheosis, which do not include Gregory Nazianzen.

5 Russell, Deification, p. 167, and Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 117, n. 5.

6 The idea runs throughout De Incarnatione: see §§8, 10, 20–1, 31, 43–4.

7 E.g. DelCogliano, Mark (BMCR 2013.07.09) and Lionel Wickham (JTS 64/2 (2013), pp. 718–21)Google Scholar.

8 The most recent major study being Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 70–4. Anatolios' attempt to justify Athanasius' scheme by calling it a functional or epistemological approach that is different from the analytical concern of Grillmeier and others merely begs the question: both positions, and the full range of christological issues that arise from the biblical communicatio idiomatum, are equally functional, epistemological and analytical (i.e. dogmatic).

9 Young, Frances M., From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background, 2nd edn, with Andrew Teal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010), p. 63Google Scholar. One finds the same conclusion in Grillmeier, Aloys, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. Bowden, John (London: Mowbrays, 1965), p. 312Google Scholar; Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian Doctrines, rev. edn (London: Harper Collins, 1978), 287–8Google Scholar; Hanson, R. P. C., The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), pp. 447–8Google Scholar; and Brakke, David, ‘Athanasius’, in Esler, Philip F. (ed.), The Early Christian World, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1122–3Google Scholar.

10 E.g. Barnes, Michel René, ‘One Nature, One Power: Consensus Doctrine in Pro-Nicene Polemic’, Studia Patristica 29 (1997), pp. 205–23 (220)Google Scholar. See also Ayres, Lewis, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which demonstrates that pro-Nicene theology arose from different and often disconnected quarters in the fourth century, rather than from a unified Athanasian front.

11 ‘Cyril of Alexandria and Gregory Nazianzen: Tradition and Complexity in Patristic Christology’, JECS 17/3 (2009), pp. 381–419.

12 See e.g. McGuckin, John A., Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Gavrilyuk points as well to Mark DelCogliano's questioning of my argument for Gregory's influence on Cyril (BMCR 2013.07.09). As evidence against my conclusion DelCogliano observes that Cyril quotes Athanasius, Ar. 3.29 (Athanasius' statement of hermeneutical method) in his letter to the monks of Egypt at the beginning of the Nestorian controversy (Ep. 1.4). But this citation does not support DelCogliano's counter-argument. Cyril quotes this passage from Athanasius' third Oration not as a hermeneutical resource, as DelCogliano argues, but in support of the confession of the Theotokos; moreover, when Cyril goes on to make a case for hermeneutical procedure in the following sections of the letter, the biblical examples that he gives do not follow Athanasius' argument anywhere in the Orations against the Arians. Following the strict procedure that DelCogliano, Gavrilyuk and I agree is essential to sound historical theology, Cyril does indeed appear to have been influenced primarily by Gregory.