Friday, April 17, 2020

Thomas G. Weinandy, "Defining ομοουσιον"



Defining ομοουσιον

At his juncture a historical question of a doctrinal nature arises. While the Council Fathers clearly professed that the Son is truly God possessing the same nature as the father, did they satisfactorily address the issue of how the Son can be truly God and yet God remain one? Arius, remember, claimed that to hold that the Son of God and heir God is one is metaphysically impossible.

At the time ομοουσιον could have been understood in two ways. The first conceived ομοουσιον specifying that two or more beings share the same common substance in a generic manner. In this sense, as two copper coins are ομοουσιον with one another in that they share the same substance of copper, so the Son is ομοουσιον with the Father in that he shares the same common divine substance. This understanding would vindicate Arius’ logic for then the Father and the Son would be two distinct realities and so there would be two gods. Some of the Council Fathers may have understood ομοουσιον in this manner—content to affirm simply that the Son is truly God.

The second understanding designate that for the Son to be ομοουσιον with the Father meant that they are one and the same reality, one and the same being. While it is impossible to determine whether most of the Fathers understood it in this sense, it would appear to be the case since the charge later laid against the Council was not that it professed two gods, but that it had fallen into modalism. Stating that the Son is ομοουσιον with the Father could mean no that they were one and the same divine reality, one and the same Go, but that they were one and the same ‘person’ expressed under two different modes—as Father and as Son.

This allegation was based on a false presupposition. Those responsible for this allegation continued to hold, as exemplified within the Origenist tradition, that the Father embodied the whole of the Godhead—he is God in the strict sense. To say, then, that the Son is ομοουσιον with him could easily be construed to mean that he and the Father are one and the same ‘person’. The one God is Father/Son. Neither now possesses his own distinct ontological identity.

Athanasius, as the authoritative interpreter of Nicaea, grasped the radical nature of Nicaea’s ομοουσιον for he appreciated that the Council’s declaration demanded a re-conception of God as a trinity of persons. For Athanasius, in keeping with Nicaea, the Father alone does not constitute the one Godhead and from whom the Son comes forth in the begetting. Rather, the one God is the Father begetting the Son. (Obviously, the Holy Spirit must be included within the oneness of God, but that is another story.) The Godhead is now newly conceived. The Father’s begetting of the Son is constitutive of the very nature of God’s oneness, and contrary to Arius’ deduction, it is metaphysically possible to conceive of the Son as God and God as one simultaneously.

For the above reasons, the term ομοουσιον and the concept it designates is of the utmost theological and doctrinal significance. It is, historically and doctrinally, the most important word and notion within Trinitarian and Christological dogma. It not only definitively defines the being of the Son as God, but it also definitively defines that this same Son is the one who is man, for the question addressed is whether or not the man Jesus is the divine Son equal to the Father. Thus, the Council of Nicaea definitely defined the first incarnational truth: it is truly the Son of God, identical in divinity with the Father, who is man. (Thomas G. Weinandy, “The Doctrinal Significance of the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon,” in Francesca Aran Murphy, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Christology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 2018], 549-67, here, pp. 554-55)