Doctrine of God
CHAPTER VI
DOCTRINE OF GOD
As an Apologist Justin Martyr was required to set forth and defend the Christian doctrine of God. As a philosopher he had to show, amidst the eclecticism of his age, that he had truly found God.
Once Christianity had burst forth from its Jewish cradle and had gained a footing in the wider Gentile world the question of the unity and power of God, as against the vagaries of pagan worship, became a major consideration. So St Paul rejoiced in reminding the Thessalonians 'how they had turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God' (I Thess. i. 9). At Lystra he urged those who would have sacrificed to him 'to turn from these vanities unto the living God who made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein' (Acts xiv. 15); and at Athens he spoke to his hearers of 'God that made the world and all things that are therein' and described him as 'Lord of heaven and earth' (Acts xvii. 24). This conception of God as the living Creator had first to be accepted before a Gentile could grasp the doctrine of the Incarnation; accordingly one great object of the Christian Apologists was to displace the current belief of the inhabitants of the GraecoRoman world in a divine pantheon and to lead them on to a belief in one God, the Creator and Ruler of the universe. It was this constructive effort which met with bitter opposition and brought on the Christians persecution. Again and again the Acts of the Martyrs record that this was the searching question put to them: 'Would they submit to serve the daemons as all the nations did?' The reply was usually this: 'There is one God who made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things therein, and one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God: I will not sacrifice to any man; I will not sacrifice to daemons.' Tertullian, in Apology xvii-xviii, tried to show that underlying the popular phrases 'Which God grant', 'If God will', was a deeper belief in one God, to whom all power belongs, and to whose will all men look. But in general the Christians refused to attribute any
JUSTIN MARTYR
power or will to the pagan deities, let alone the genius of the Emperor, and for this refusal they were sometimes tortured and put to death.
The doctrine of God, in the pages of the New Testament, presupposed the monotheistic faith of Israel. But in the teaching of Jesus this assumed a form at once more deep and profound. Whereas in the Old Testament God was regarded as Father of the Universe, i.e. the Creator and Sustainer of the physical world, and in a moral and physical sense 'Father of Israel and the Israelites'—the sense of Fatherhood was limited by other conceptions.! In the teaching of Jesus this one idea of God as Father controls and determines everything else. 'My
Father'? was a characteristic form of address—a conviction at once personal to himself. Yet Jesus also spoke to his disciples of God as 'your Father'? and :so the close intimate communion he realised was to be theirs also. This Fatherhood of God extended to the good and evil alike, the just and the unjust; and God was Father of all animate things from the plants to the fowls of the air. The Fatherhood of God gave personal content to the Jewish monotheism which had been inherited from the Bible and which was essentially expressed in the idea of God as Creator and Sustainer of the universe.
The earliest Christian writers were much concerned with God as Creator and far less with his attribute of Fatherhood. This was quite natural in the face of the popular eclecticism of the age which addressed its worship to many deities. Thus, according to Hermas, the first commandment is to believe 'that God is one, who made all things and perfected them, and made all things to be out of that which was not, and contains all things, and is himself alone uncontained' (Mand. i. 1). For Clement of Rome God is 'the Father and Creator of the entire cosmos'
(I Clem. xix. 2), and for the writers of the Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache 'our Maker' (Barn. xix.
2, Did. i. 2). A frequent designation, suggesting his universal sovereignty, was
1 See J. F. Bethune-Baker, An Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine (London, 1949), p. 12.
* Matt. xi. 27, vi. 4, 6, 8; John ii. 16, v. 17. Cf. St Paul's frequent use of the phrase 'The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ', Col. i. 3; Eph. i. 3;
I) Corsin3s xi 3 ° Matt. vi. 8, 15, x. 20; Luke vi. 36; cf. Matt. vi. 9; John xx. 17. e.
70's
DOCTRINE OF GOD
'the Lord Almighty', 'the Lord who governs the whole universe ',? and 'the Master of all things'.® Although most of these ideas derive from the biblical background of the early Church they also reflect contemporary philosophic speculation. Thus Clement of Rome's references to God's ordering the cosmos! echo later Stoic beliefs. This influence becomes more pronounced in the writings of the Greek
Apologists as would be expected in view of their philosophic training. Aristides of Athens opens his Apology' with an outline demonstration of God's existence based on Aristotle's wellknown argument from motion. Although God is himself uncreated he has created everything for man; the heavens do not contain him—rather he contains them as he contains everything visible and invisible. Hence Christians acknowledge God as Creator and Demiurge of all things, and apart from him worship no other God.
This twofold background is also evident in the writings of Justin Martyr. As a result of his conversion to the Christian
Faith and his subsequent life in the Church Justin had inherited the rich biblical doctrine of God. God had become a living reality to him and also a living factor in human history and life. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had revealed God's character and will and through his gracious gift had brought him near to men. God was thus no impassive observer of human life but actively concerned in the conduct of his creatures as a gracious Father. Yet Justin remained a Platonist even after his conversion to Christianity. He retained the idea of God as unknowable and transcendent, the Unmoved first cause, Nameless and Unutterable, far removed from the struggles of day-to-day existence. Indeed it would be fair to say that this philosophic idea of God remained uppermost in his mind and threatened, at times, to overwhelm the more biblical and Christian idea which Justin knew as a fact of experience. We must now consider these two conceptions of Deity more fully:
(a) Justin's biblical and Christian background: This is shown Te Dids x03.
2 Barn. xxi. 5.
3 I Clem. viii. 2. See the discussion in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 83.
4 Chs. xx, xxxiil.
5 i, 4. See the full discussion in Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 84. aD
JUSTIN MARTYR
in his insistence that God is not to be worshipped as if he needed anything! like the gods of the polytheists. On the other hand he is a living God, the most true,? the real,? alone having life in himself. God exercises every noble quality—he is 'the Father of righteousness and temperance and other virtues'.° He is
'good',® especially towards men—the righteous observer of all things'—compassionate and long-suffering. Thus he is 'the Father and Maker of all', 'the Father and Lord of all',1° 'the Father and King of the heavens', or more simply 'the Father of all', including Christ and man as well as the universe.
According to Justin God knows both the actions and the thoughts of all his creatures'® and can do whatever he wills.' He foreknows everything—not because events are necessary, nor because he has decreed that men shall act as they do or be what they are; but foreseeing all events he ordains reward or punishment accordingly.1® God's interest in man is unceasing; he is no far away observer of human life!® but is actively concerned in the conduct of his rational creatures,' requiring their obedience and enforcing his moral law.1® He spares the wicked world that more people may be saved!® and so that the hopes of the Christians may be fulfilled.2° Indeed he created the world out of goodness for man's sake?! and it was in accordance with his counsel that Christ came." God cares not merely for the universe in general but for each individual in particular."*
It will be seen from these quotations—and more could have been given—that Justin is drawing on the biblical and Christian conception of God as a living Creator, a compassionate and long-suffering Father who in Christ has drawn near to his creation and who is concerned with the welfare of every individual soul. This was the God to whom Justin prayed and, with his fellow Christians, worshipped.
1 J Apol. x.
2 I Apol. vi.
3 TI Apol. xiii. aS Dialavas 5 I Apol. vi.
6 I Apol. xiv, xvi.
" II Apol. xii.
8 Dial. cviii.
® I Apol. viii; Dial. cxl.
10 [ Apol. xii, Xxxil.
11 JT Apol. xii.
12 T Apol. xii, xlv, lxv; I Apol. vi, ix; Dial. vii, xxxii, lvi, cv.
13 JT Apol. xii; IT Apol. xii.
14 T Apol. xix; Dial. v, vi, xvi, cxlii.
18 T Apol. xii, xliii, xliv; IT Apol. vii.
16 J Apol. xxviii.
WT Apol. xxxvii.
18 JI Apol. vii, ix.
19 JT Apol. xxviii.
20 II Apol. vii.
21 IT Apol. x; II Apol.iv.
?? II Apol. vi.
2S Dales ~ ras
DOCTRINE OF GOD
(b) Justin's philosophical conception of Deity: Yet side by side with this idea of God is another which derives from his philosophical training and background. Justin particularly emphasises God's transcendence and rejects emphatically the Stoic idea of immanence which involved God in the process of flux and consequently in a change of nature.
For if they (i.e. the Stoics) say that human actions come to pass by fate, they will maintain either that God is nothing else than the things which are ever turning, and altering, and dissolving into the same things, and will appear to have had a comprehension only of things that are destructible, and to have looked on God himself as emerging both in part and in whole in every wickedness; or that neither vice nor virtue is anything; which is contrary to every sound idea, reason and sense.} In opposition to this immanence Justin asserts that God cannot be identified with change or with motion in space.?
He is transcendent, unchangeable,® eternal, passionless,* the incorruptible one.® Justin denies that God is in any way spatially determined whether by the universe as a whole or by a single place in the universe.® He attacks the Stoic identification of the Deity with the world precisely on the grounds of God's stability and freedom from change and motion in space.'
A corollary to this emphasis on the Divine Transcendence, far removed from this world, is Justin's assertion that God has no name.® The terms 'Father', 'God', 'Creator', 'Lord' and 'Master' do not describe what he is but are mere appellations to set forth his manifested activities.' In essence God is nameless because he came into existence from no external impulse and had no antecedents; hence there was no one to give hima name!" as only a name given to a person by an elder is properly a name.
Justin can even say that although there is pronounced over a person to be baptised the name of God the Father and Lord of the Universe, yet 'no one can utter the name of the ineffable
God; and if anyone dares to say that there is a name, he raves with hopeless madness'.! Justin assumes that this idea of the 1 II Apol. vii.
2 Dial. cxxvii.
8 I Apol. xiii.
4 &mra6ts. I Apol. xii; I Apol. xii.
5 Dial. v.
6 Dial. cxxvii.
7 ITI Apol. vii, ix.
8 I Apol. x.
9 JI Apol. vi.
0 llgah, 11 J Apol. 1xi.
JUSTIN MARTYR
namelessness of God will be familiar to some of his readers:
'all the Jews even now teach that the nameless God spoke to Moses'.} ; The unutterableness of God was another of Justin's emphases and on one occasion he combines this with the concept of namelessness,2 although usually it appears alone. The term is intended to convey the immense chasm between God and man;
God is beyond human reason and what little we comprehend of him is quite inexpressible. Only by revelation can man find the truth—and this revelation is enshrined in the teaching of the prophets and Jesus Christ.
We have noted earlier? that Justin reproduces the Aristotelian idea of God as Unmoved Mover who existed before the world was made. Yet as Aristotle insisted that the Deity must have activity so Justin says that God carries on the same ordering of the universe during the Sabbath as during all other days.4
A favourite term which Justin uses to describe the transcendence of God is unbegotten (&yévvntos). Goodenough? has pointed out that Justin consistently uses &yévvntos rather than c&yévntos, which is the philosophical term expressing the fact that the Deity has no beginning and, as such, is superior to the exigencies of change and decay to which all other created beings are subject. &yévvntos, used by Justin, means unbegotten and is found more rarely than the other term. It signifies uncaused, not brought into existence from anything outside itself, and is properly applied to a self-caused being. So Aristotle: 'If there is nothing eternal, neither can there be any coming into existence; for any real thing which comes into existence necessarily presupposes some real thing from which it came into existence, and the last term of such a series must be unbegotten'
(c&yévvrtos).® c&yévntos, on the other hand, could only be applied to something which never had a beginning of any kind and is a more expressive term than é&yévvntos for explaining the eternal nature of God. Christians, however, found é&yévvntos useful in distinguishing God the Father from God the Son; the former was unbegotten, uncaused, while Christ was begotten, albeit eternally. Goodenough doubts whether Justin is using the correct term when he uses éyévvntos as the antithesis of 1 I Apol. \xiii.
2 I Apol. 1xi.
3 Pp. 30-1, 35-6. Dial. cxxvii.
2S Dial sexxixe 2 Ops cit. pa sgounee & Metaph. B 4, g99b, 7 f.
862-5
DOCTRINE OF GOD
a&Ocavatos and states blandly that Justin was a philosophical dilettante who confused the two words because he knew them largely from hearsay.!
If we could sum up Justin's philosophic idea of God we should say that God is for him the eternal, immovable, unchanging
Cause and Ruler of the Universe, nameless and unutterable, unbegotten, residing far above the heavens, and is incapable of coming into immediate contact with any of his creatures, yet is observant of them although removed from them and unapproachable by them. God is the Universal Father, transcendent in his nature, who can act only through an intermediate being.
Where did Justin obtain this philosophic conception of the Deity ? Goodenough is quite sure that his God is the God of Hellenistic Judaism and particularly that of Philo.
'The phrases and shreds of philosophical speculation about God are still recognisably a Christian adaptation of those of the GreekJewish school, and show no trace of an immediate borrowing from the pages or even the traditions of the schools of Greece."
Thus Goodenough can quote Philonic parallels to many of Justin's statements: e.g. Justin's denial that God is spatially determined finds a parallel in Philo's argument in Conf. Ling.
136, 139: 'For who does not know that he who comes down must necessarily leave one place and occupy another?...God generated space and location along with bodies, and we may not assert that the Maker is contained in any of the things produced. ..Accordingly all terms of motion involving change of place are inapplicable to God in his true nature.'* Similarly
Justin's coupling of the namelessness and unutterableness of God' is remarkably like a passage in Philo, De Mutat. Nom.
13 f., where Philo urges, in commenting on the incident of the burning bush, that God is unutterable and nameless. Any name which we use of God is not a name but only an appellation
(tedopnois), for a name properly so called describes or limits the one named, while God has only revealed himself to man as 'the Existent' and is not more accurately to be described.
Goodenough thinks that this passage is the origin of Justin's idea of God as unutterable and nameless. He believes this to be
1 Theology of Justin Martyr, p. 130.
2 Ibid. p.124.
* Ibid. p.125n.4.
* I Apol. lxi.
BJM
JUSTIN MARTYR
proved by Philo's further explanation that names are a symbol of created things; wherefore God, as the eldest of all beings, and as such having no predecessor who could have created or begotten him, is the nameless God.
Goodenough's theory is, on the surface, attractive. We know that Philo's works were not preserved by his fellow Jews?— no doubt owing to the resurgence of Pharisaic Judaism following on the reconstruction of Judaism at Jamnia after A.D. 70 which looked with disfavour on Philo's attempt to bridge the gulf between the Greek and Jewish worlds. Philo's works were, it seems, preserved by the Church and influenced some early
Christian writers such as the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Eusebius. Yet caution is needed before we find in Philo the primary influence on Justin's philosophical conception of God. It is significant that nowhere else does Justin reflect any of Philo's typical views such as his allegorism and doctrine of the divine powers in the universe.®
Nowhere does Justin show any direct acquaintance with Hellenistic Judaism other than with the Wisdom literature. I believe that full weight must be given to Justin's own account of his studies before becoming a Christian. He passed, as he says,* from contemporary Platonism into Christianity and he tells us that he was favourably disposed towards the former which was a true praeparatio evangelica. It is therefore a priort likely that his philosophical idea of God was at least influenced by the Middle Platonist milieu and teaching in which, Justin says, he progressed and made the greatest improvement daily.®
We have shown in a previous chapter® that this was in fact the case in respect of his general philosophical approach. It is a 1 Goodenough, Theology of Justin Martyr, p. 131.
» The first Jew to mention Philo by name after his time was A. de Rossi
(A.D. 1573).
3 E. A. Abbott, Modern Review (July 1882), was one of the first to claim direct literary dependence of Justin on Philo. His examples seem to me to be doubtful. Thus Justin uses the phrase Aoyos OTTEPUaATIKds in a way different from Philo; the description of the logos as &tepos (Dial. lv) than God is surely not dependent on Philo's SeUtepos Seds—it was a natural description to use in view of Justin's theology. Moreover, the illustration of the generation of the logos by the kindling of fire from fire may have been quite widespread. Far too much has been made of Philo's influence on Early Christian theology.
Se Dial eats 5. [bid.
6 Ch. m., 82°
DOCTRINE OF GOD
failing of Goodenough's approach when he states that Justin's origins lie in Hellenistic Judaism simply because his idea of God cannot be fitted into Classical Platonism. Contemporary Platonism, as we have seen,! was an eclectic amalgam of different, and at times contradictory, streams of philosophy and it is this which accounts for the particular emphases in Justin's idea of God. This is the source of his seeming inconsistencies rather than his being a philosophical dilettante.
Thus Justin's use of the Aristotelian idea of the non-spatial Unmoved Mover coupled with a Platonic emphasis on God's utter transcendence find their origin and background, as already noted," in the system of Albinus the Middle Platonist.
It is quite unnecessary to bring in Philo who, in any case, knew Plato and Aristotle only through the medium of Middle Platonism. Similarly, Justin's conception of God as nameless and unutterable, based on a passage in Timaeus 28c, reflects the ecclecticism of the Middle Platonists who interpreted this passage in the same way as Justin.® Our conclusion is that two conceptions of the Deity existed in Justin's mind. On the one hand was his acceptance of the biblical and Christian idea of God as a living Creator, a compassionate Father who in Christ had drawn near to men and who was concerned with the welfare of each soul. On the other hand
Justin retained the Middle Platonist emphasis on God as the unknowable and transcendent Cause far removed from the world and disconnected with it. Justin, as a Christian, knew the living God, yet it would seem that he could not formulate the divine indwelling in intellectual terms. In the Dialogue he defines God as 'that which always maintains the same nature, and in the same manner, and is the cause of all other things'.*
He also appeals to Plato's description of that 'Being who is the cause of all discerned by the mind, having no colour, nor form, nor magnitude, nor anything visible to the eye; but it is something of this sort, that is beyond all essence, unutterable, and inexplicable, but alone beautiful and good, coming suddenly to souls that are naturally well-dispositioned on account of their affinity with, and desire to see, him'.® Justin had no real theory
1 Tbid.
2 Pp. 20-37.
3 See more fully p. 35.
"Dials wa.
5 Dial. iv.
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of divine immanence to complement his emphasis on divine transcendence. His doctrine of the logos, soon to be discussed,' in fact kept the supreme Deity at a safe distance from intercourse with men and left the Platonic transcendence in all its bareness.
God for Justin operated through the logos whose existence alone bridged the gulf which would have otherwise proved impassable.
Justin worshipped the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ; he prayed to the living God who had brought salvation in Christ; but it was not given to him, as a pioneer second-century
Apologist, to unite transcendence and immanence in a system at once rational and biblical.
1 Ch. vu.