In this defense of
the Christian faith against pagan criticisms, written in Greek around the year
177 and addressed to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius Antonius and Lucius
Aurelius Commodus, Athenagoras sets outs the main features of the gospel in a
lucid and reasoned manner. The early Christians were accused of atheism on
account of their refusal to worship the emperor. In this extract, in which
Athenagoras explains what Christians believe about God, important anticipations
of later thinking of the Trinity can be detected. The work is known by various
names, including Apologia, Legatio
and Supplicatio pro Christianis. In excerpted
of his writing he wrote,
“So we
are not atheists, in that we acknowledge one God, who is uncreated, eternal,
invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, and without limit. He is apprehended
only by the intellect and the mind, and is surrounded by light, beauty, spirit,
and indescribable power. The universe was created and ordered, and is presently
sustained, through his Logos (that is, Jesus Christ)… For we acknowledge also a
“Son of God.” Nobody should think it ridiculous that God should have a Son.
Although the pagan poets, in their frictions, represent the gods as being no
better than human beings, we do not think in the same way as they do concerning
either God the Father or God the Son. For the Son of God is the Logos of the
Father, both in thought and in reality. It was through his action, and after
his pattern, that all things were made, in that the Father and the Son are one…
[The
Son] is the first creation of the Father – not meaning that he was brought into
existence, in that, from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind (nous), had the Logos within himself,
being eternally of the character of the Logos (logikos). Rather, it is meant that he came forth to be the pattern
and motivating power of all physical things… We affirm that the Holy Spirit,
who was active in the prophets, is an effluence of God, who flows from him and
returns to him, like a beam of the sun.”
[Source: Apologia, X, 1-4; in Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectionem
ed. W. R. Schoedel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 20-2.]
“I [Jesus Christ] and
my Father are one” (John
10:30)
THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO
DEEP.
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