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PATRISTIC AND THE ARITHMETIC OF THE DIVINE FROM THE APOLOGISTS TO ATHANASIUS

James D. Ernest*

In reflecting on the harvest of post-Enlightenment critical method- ologies, several biblical scholars have wished to remind fellow members of the guild that the subject of their researches is essentially theolog- ical. Thus a collection of previously published essays by Paul Minear is titled The and the Historian: Breaking the Silence about God in Bibli- cal Studies.1 Minear argues that the methodological presuppositions of the historian keep historical-critical exegetes from attending to those very elements of the biblical texts, including divine persons and mirac- ulous events, that most centrally express the concerns of the text and its authors. His critique may be compared with Nils Dahl’s essay “The Neglected Factor in ”—the neglected factor being God.2 Current New Testament theology, Dahl complained, did not discuss God directly but only spoke “about the way in which the New Testament authors speak about God.” Thus the discourse of cur- rent scholars about God is “indirect.” Dahl allowed as a partial excuse for this indirectness the fact that the New Testament itself “contains few, if any, thematic formulations about God”; rather, it tends to take for granted the concept of God inherited by first-century Judaism from the . Nevertheless, he urged “a careful, analytic descrip- tion of words and phrases and of their use within sentences and larger units of speech” aimed at deriving from New Testament discourse— which is admittedly diverse in its settings, genres, and aims—a set of common themes in theology proper. He himself lists and comments on

* James D. Ernest is author of The Bible in Athanasius (Bible in Ancient 2; Boston: Brill, 2004), a dissertation with its roots in an Athanasius seminar co- taught by Lloyd Patterson and Brian Daley. He is an editor for Baker Academic in Grand Rapids, Michigan and an adjunct instructor in at Calvin Theological Seminary. 1 Paul S. Minear, The Bible and the Historian: Breaking the Silence about God in (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002). 2 Nils A. Dahl, “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology,” Reflection 73 (1975): 5–8; reprinted in the (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 153–164. 124 james d. ernest several statements: God is one; the Creator is the giver of life; God is the sovereign ruler; God is the righteous judge; God is merciful. In terms of Dahl’s own critique, such statements qualify as direct rather than indirect discourse; but—to import another distinction used by some contemporary writers on liturgy—they are still in the realm not of theologia prima but of theologia secunda in that they are objective and descriptive (that is, they are statements about God) rather than subjec- tively engaged (discourse addressed to God). It seems that Minear, in contrast, aware that his teaching was not purely academic but was also aimed at preparing pastors and priests for ministry in the (as was Lloyd Patterson’s), wished to draw the student of the New Testa- ment into personal engagement in the life-settings of early Christianity. Thus, as J. Louis Martyn writes in the foreword to Minear’s collection: Patiently leading us by the hand, then, Minear transports us into the vibrant worship services of the first-century churches. Here we do not silence our critical faculties, but we do find that in that scene, text and worship flow into each other. We not only read the Bible; we also give thanks for it. For, with our early Christian ancestors we listen to scripture in a setting punctuated by prayers of thanksgiving to God, by confessions of faith, by the singing of text as we sit at table with the first Christians, even while we sit at table with our contemporaries, we praise God.3 Minear himself, asking how the church gains access to the knowledge of God, replies that it must do so in a way that corresponds to the reve- latory event in which God makes that knowledge available, namely, the death and resurrection of Christ. It enters into “authentic knowledge of revelation” by way of “repentance, forgiveness, and obedient faith- fulness to its mission as Christ’s body.” Minear’s concern to understand the New Testament by way of engagement with its religious discourse is in a way echoed in Luke Timothy Johnson’s Religious Experience in Ear- liest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Study.4 Johnson, who says he looked to practitioners of religious studies for a description of the religious experience of the earliest Christians, ends up with a diag- nosis analogous to Minear’s complaint against biblical scholars: their Kantian methodological presupposition that the referent of religious language is the psychology or mentality of the religious person and not, as the religious person believes, some external power, produces a sys- tematic misrepresentation of the phenomena they wish to study.

3 J. Louis Martin, foreword, in Minear, The Bible and the Historian, 14. 4 Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1998.