The History of Christian Thought

I just finished reading The History of Christian Thought. I found it to be full of interesting information. Here are some random notes.

• The amount of internal variation within Christian thought is pretty astounding. Honestly, the Protestant / Catholic split seems quite small compared to all the rest.
  
  
• Christian philosophy was pretty much Greek philosophy for the first 1500 years. That is, it was pretty much Greek philosophers grappling with understanding Jesus.
  
  Of course, I knew already that the authors of the New Testament wrote in Greek, so they would clearly be influenced by Greek thought. But I was unaware of how explicitly Platonist even some portions of the Bible are (e.g., the "logos" part).
  
  Early Christian theologians continued in this vein. St. Augustine was a self-declared Platonist. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy came largely from applying Aristotelian ideas to these questions.
  
  These Greek influences were well known to later theologians.
  
  Bultmann and his colleagues though that the trinity and other ideas were Greek ideas (he's got a point). They tried to separate out the "authentic" Christian faith from these Greek influences.
  
  The Process Theologians said that the classical doctrine of God (perfect, unchanging, omnipotent) "has far more to do with Plato than the Bible". (I'll have to disagree with that, however, since the authors of the Bible were Platonists also.)
  
  
• The book points out some key instances where the contemporary understanding of Jesus was dependent on the cultural surroundings.
  
  Specifically, this had to do with the explanation of Jesus's death and resurrection. Nearly all of the early theologians agreed that this was Jesus somehow giving God the justice he demanded for mankind's sins. However, the notion of what "justice" means has varied through time, and as theories of justice changed, so did these explanations. For example, one theory espoused the "substitution" model (Jesus took our place), but that only made sense when people believed it was okay for one person to take punishment on behalf of another. When people stopped believing that, another theory emerged.
  
  
• More recent theologians have continued to point out how earlier theories were projecting their own ideas onto Jesus.
  
  Schweitzer said "there is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as a writing of the life of Jesus".
  
  The Liberal Theologians (in the generations just before Bultmann) were perhaps the worst offenders here. They ignored common themes repeated many times by Jesus that happened not to fit nicely in their theology. But they are certainly far from the only ones who did this. As Schweitzer pointed out, nearly every theology suffers from this.
  
  Indeed, Bultmann pointed out that this goes back to the authors of the Bible themselves. He described how their description of the events in the Bible is strongly shaped by their worldview, which he described as a "mythological" view (meaning that it involves and describes phenomena as one would find in mythology — he's not implying they were liars).
  
  
• I continued to be surprised by all of the "modern" ideas that appeared long ago. For example, I knew that St. Augustine did not believe the Old Testament was literally true (he thought it was allegorical), but there were many others: the nature of God is unknowable, God exists outside time, predestination (i.e., a deterministic universe), etc. all date back 1000 years or more.
  
  
• Bonhoeffer's had an interesting observation about "the God of the gaps" (that is, when God is used to fill in gaps in knowledge). We're all aware of how this was done in understanding of nature in the past. But Bonhoeffer claims this was true in theology as well, and that it had the same outcome: people who understood God as inhabiting these gaps saw their theologies wither away as our understanding of theological principles increased over time.
  
  Bonhoeffer, in general, seemed to me to be the most original thinker over 2000 of Christian thought. (That is not to say that I agree with him, of course.)
  

Certainly, the book is far from perfect in my eyes.

There was a huge amount of effort spent on topics that I find uninteresting (e.g., the structure of heaven or the interaction between the components of the trinity). To be fair, though, this is just the fact that I have a modern perspective. Clearly, the Platonist thinkers found these questions to be interesting. However, if you also find that boring, then you would be bored by many sections of this book.

Finally there was very little emphasis on moral philosophy. Here, I do not know whether to blame the book or the philosophers themselves. Clearly, some theologians spent a time thinking about moral philosophy, but perhaps they were in the minority or not especially influential in the long run.

That said, learning about Christian moral philosophy was the reason I picked up the book in the first place, so that was disappointing. I'll have to look elsewhere for a better discussion.