The Value of Historical Theology

Playing Defense: Defeating Spurious Historical Claims

I was working on a writing project when the phone rang. It was Greg Koukl, a former student who heads an excellent apologetics ministry called Stand to Reason. The movie of Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, was about to be released, and Greg was writing an article dealing with the claims of the book. He wanted my opinion of some claims in the book concerning the Council of Nicea and the canon of scripture. I hadn’t read the book yet and listened as Greg read me some quotes.

“So, Alan ... what do you think?”

What did I think? I scarcely knew where to begin. “This is nuts!” I blurted out, exasperated. “Surely no one is taking this seriously!”

“Actually,” Greg replied, “this book is having quite an impact, and not just among unbelievers. I’ve talked to quite a few Christians who are really shaken by its claims.”

Wow! What a great argument for knowing something about the history of the Christian tradition, I thought. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how Christian doctrine developed wouldn’t fall for this stuff. An attack such as The Da Vinci Code is probably best handled by laying bare its many specific factual errors. (This has been done very well in a number of books and articles, so I won’t take the space here to give specific examples.) And I certainly think this is a good way to torpedo a book so rife with such errors. After being confronted with the first dozen or so blatant falsehoods, the reader soon realizes that Dan Brown is utterly untrustworthy and that nothing in the book is to be believed. The reader comes to understand in short order the truth of what Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 135-c. 203) declared while refuting some of the Da Vinci Code–like teaching of his own day: “It is not necessary to drink up the ocean in order to learn that its water is salty.”²

We have all heard the well–worn maxim that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. That maxim assumes a state of historical awareness often greater than that which obtains today in society and in our churches. These days it is more aptly said that those who don’t even know the past are fair game for the hucksters who would rewrite it. Perhaps Dan Brown has actually done a favor: Many Christians who never before had an awareness of Christian history or the development of Christian doctrine are now clamoring for answers.

But there are other sorts of assaults where a more nuanced or systemic knowledge of the history of doctrine may be required. Sometimes the use of historical materials in combating error is better accomplished with greater attention to the overall flow or shape of Christian theology. That is, an adequate response may require more than pointing simply to errors in dates and persons and places and events and quotes. Some errors are more subtle than this and so may require responses with greater nuance.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind. A basic tenet of Mormon theology is that through faithful obedience to the principles of the gospel (i.e., the teachings of Mormonism) a person may attain “exaltation,” becoming a God or Goddess in their life beyond this mortal existence. The LDS doctrine is succinctly captured by the oft–quoted couplet of Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Mormon Church: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

In an attempt to impart the patina of historic orthodoxy to this monstrous error, some Mormon apologists have begun citing certain church fathers, who they claim made the same or a fundamentally similar point to what the Mormons are making, employing language not unlike what one finds in Joseph Smith. Specifically, there is a teaching found in certain Church Fathers (particularly in the Fathers of the Eastern Church, though one finds it in the writings of some of the Western Fathers as well) that is called theosis or “deification.” According to this teaching, the glorified Christian is destined to become “divinized” or to “become god.” To cite but one example: Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (c. 296-373), wrote, “For he [the Word] was made man that we might be made God.”³

And so Mormon apologists claim orthodox Christians practice a double standard. When Mormons say that man can progress to Godhood, we excoriate them as heretics. But when Athanasius says it, we call him the “Father of orthodoxy,” or at the very least give him a pass. And likewise for a vast number of other church fathers who also made statements of this kind.

It won’t do to charge that the Mormons falsified or concocted these quotations, Dan Brown style, for they have not. Athanasius indeed said what they quote him as saying. And so did all the others. The proper response requires us to grasp the overall theological shape of the early Christians’ doctrine of God, and the place of theosis within it. With an understanding of both the flow and the content of HT, we can see that the Mormons equivocate terms when they claim that the words God and divinization mean the same thing for the church fathers that they do for the Mormons. And we recognize when they rip a particular quotation out of its literary and historical context, sundering it from the overall thought of a thinker and from the proximate context of his remarks in a particular document. It’s easy to show that these early fathers were strict monotheists who did not believe that man and God were of the same species, nor that God the Father had a Father before him, who had a Father before him, ad infinitum (as the Mormons teach). Nor did these early fathers believe that God attained Godhood in conformity with the law of eternal progression, as a reward for his faithful obedience.

To get at the fundamental falsehood at the bottom of the LDS position requires a broad grasp of the doctrinal shape of patristic theology. Having studied the doctrine of theosis and how it fits systemically in the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of God, we understand that these fathers did believe in a communication of divine qualities to redeemed believers, but one that is relative, not absolute. The early fathers made it clear that there are certain communicable attributes that are consistent for God to impart to his creatures, such as holiness and immortality. At the same time, these fathers taught with equal clarity that there were certain unique, incommunicable attributes that would forever distinguish the believer from the God of the Bible, ontologically speaking. Among these is the attribute of self–existence, or what is technically called aseity. That is, God is not a contingent being, depending on anyone or anything for his existence. He exists from eternity and to eternity–complete, perfect, and fully actualized in and of himself. And it is of the biblical God alone that this can be predicated. In short, the early fathers were all strict monotheists, not LDS polytheists.