Reading: The AAA Theology
We're now going to tackle that contrast that I hope will make the first theological position I sketched clearer. And in relation to it. This is the theology that is promoted by Augustine, entrenched by Anselm and refined by Aquinas. And since each of their last names begin with a, in my book, I call this the triple A theology has nothing to do with helping cars that have broken down, it's just, these three men are the three great champions of this point of view. And they are going to hold in contrast that God is the being with all perfections and only perfections. And in fact, that's how Gods to be defined. That's what God is. So they want to say God is a being that has infinite love, mercy, just knowledge, power, these things are infinite as God possesses them. However, this seems to run into a snag. And it's one that Augustine himself recognized. All three of these guys recognize it, and they all propose the same answer to it. If you say that God has infinite power, and you take that to mean that God can do anything. It runs into all kinds of trouble. For example, there's the wisecrack question we get from Sunday school kids. If God can do anything, can he make a rock so big? He can't lift it? And of course, either way, you answer that there's something God can't do. Could God make four and 4 12 and 5/8s? Can God make square circles? The kind of thing that arises if you say God can do anything. So what these thinkers in this line proposed, particularly Thomas Aquinas is that God can do anything that is possible. He can't do impossible things like make circle square, or make a rock so big he can't lift it. But anything that's possible, God can do. And by doing this, he recognizes that he has to do something with illogical laws, the law of non contradiction. And so he includes that in the being of God, among the perfections, then, are all of the necessary truths, the laws of logic and mathematics are also all parts of this. Which for Plato was a separate realm of perfections. And now for these three thinkers, all converges in God, but they didn't want to say they didn't want put this, we'll see there are these perfections. And now God's the being that has them all, that makes the perfections prior to God, that means there couldn't be God unless there were perfections. And that sounds wrong, it is wrong. And they were right to be sensitive to this. And so what Augustine proposes right away is, it's not that God possesses these, he just is them. He is the unity of all the perfections. We can't conceive what that unity would be like, because we don't know what it is to say that goodness, is the same as justice is the same as power is the same as knowledge, same as mercy. But God, since there's only one God, all these perfections are unified in a way we can't conceive of. In our world, and to our intelligence, we have to break up we name them. So this is their view of the very nature of God. God's the being with all earthly perfections. Among other things, he has perfect existence, which means he doesn't depend on anything else. He's self existent. So they include that. And then they want to say it's not that there's a being called God, and there are all these perfections that he didn't create. And then he has them that would make him depend on them. But that
God is the unity of the perfections. So it's not that the perfections exist independently of God. God is the perfections and the perfections are God. That's just about the reverse of the theology I skipped. Sketched over here. The earlier ones is the one that the Greek Orthodox tradition has held ever since the fourth century. These these are the main expositors of this view, are the Cappadocian fathers. Saint Basil of Caesarea. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. Gregory of Nyssa and Basil's sister Macrina and it was rediscovered the time of the Reformation. I find this view expressed often enough in Luther and explicitly endorsing Calvin by Calvin. But it was not followed by Protestantism generally. Luther and Calvin risked their lives to bring reform to the church. And the theology that of the Eastern Church, which they rediscovered was just a sidelight as far as the Protestant movement. In general is concerned, it went for foreword with what it saw as reforms of the church and the liturgy, and all the rest. But they did not follow Luther and Calvin on their doctrine of God. That doesn't mean nobody did. I mean, I'm talking about Protestantism as a worldwide movement as a whole, the prevailing theology is still the AAA theology. So you hear you have, yes, God has characteristics we can understand. That's because God actually enters into creation, takes on characteristics we can understand, deals with us in ways we can conceive of and understand the know, in order to know the nature in which this is the way John Calvin puts it the nature in which he is pleased to manifest himself. It's his choice. Over here, nothing is God's choice. God just is the being with all the perfections. And so he has to act in accordance with them. In a real sense, God doesn't have as much free will, as you and I, on this view, because God is compelled by the perfections, that he just is to act in the ways he does. Let's do a little more contrast of this. Remind you that I had said before. Basil of Caesarea, commented, if there are perfections, God created them, maybe he was expressing doubt, and the indeed, the Cappadocians, and the other theologians of the Eastern Church, held a conference after writing of the Nicene Creed. And in that post conference, they commented on the Nicene Creed. And one of the major thrusts of that was the rejection of Plato. That's not how a Christian is to see relationship with God. It's not just that there are perfections, and they just are God. That would say, then that God did not create everything visible or invisible. So that's not a position where we're ever going to take. And the Western Church, Latin speaking church, they did take exactly that. The last, the last of the Cappadocians died in 397. Augustine lived until 430. So that place, could place it in time for you. If remember the Nicene Creed was completed in 325. So this is ancient stuff, but mightily important and still powerfully expressed and maintained by the two theological traditions. I'm hoping that this much of a contrast will make this clearer now. I'm sorry, I can't hear you answer whether you whether it is or it isn't. But we'll come back and we'll do a little more and we'll review it again.