The Way to Nicaea (review)

John Behr. The Way to Nicaea. Formation of Christian Theology 1. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 261. $29.95.

John Behr, professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, has inaugurated a new series in the history of theology (intended to cover the period up to the Second Council of Nicaea) with an interesting and unusual volume on the first three centuries. There is some tension between this book's place in a series and Behr's own project. Though he says "that more attention has been given to understanding earlier writers on their own terms rather than as stages on the way to later landmarks, such as Nicaea and Chalcedon" (5-6), he sometimes slips into the latter approach (for example, 75-76 and 200-201).

Behr attempts neither a history of dogma nor a typical patrology. Instead, he offers a provocative thesis which I would summarize as follows: the main line of development in Christian theology portrays Christ incarnate as the argument, the "hypothesis" of Scripture, that is, of the Old Testament, now come in history, and theology remained safely orthodox only when it maintained that living link to Scripture.

Behr cites Aristotle on the role of hypotheses as "the starting points or first principles (archai) of demonstrations" (32), and he continues the interplay of Scripture and the canon of faith throughout the book, most effectively in the section on Christ in the New Testament and the chapter on Irenaeus. This approach enables him to give the most straightforward account I have seen of Irenaeus' doctrine of "recapitulation" (123-30), and it provides good insight into the aims of Origen (169), which could have been developed further in a different sort of book. Other chapters address Ignatius of Antioch, whose letters are treated as kerygma rather than as works of circumstance; Justin; "Hippolytus and the Roman Debates"; and Paul of Samosata. The eclecticism is justified by the working out of Behr's thesis, not that evidence for it was unavailable in Theophilus, Tertullian, Cyprian, or Lactantius, but that the chosen authors provided enough and seem to be related. I think that the overall thesis deserves extended consideration as a hermeneutical key to ante-Nicene Christian theology, and I hope to see it examined further both by Behr and by others.

Behr makes certain critical decisions, as everyone must: he considers Irenaeus' Demonstration earlier than the Against Heresies (112); he ascribes the Contra Noetum to Hippolytus without hesitation (146; 156); and he accepts the correspondence between Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria as authentic, while recognizing the doubts of Abramowski and Heil (202). These are disputed issues, and one takes one's chances.

My own main questions about Behr's argument concern Justin. For one thing, more respect should be given to the genres of the Apologies and the Dialogue: Justin calls Christ "teacher" in the former, but not in the latter (101, n. 21), and there is no good reason to conclude that "for Justin, Christ is primarily the teacher" (105). In neither genre does Justin need to deal with Paul or John, so there are no grounds for saying that he "seemed reluctant to handle" their texts (113). Albert Houssiau pointed out long ago that for Justin the saints of old saw the Word, but for Irenaeus they saw prophetic visions of the Word incarnate. Behr values this contrast but goes too far when he sees in Irenaeus no "continuity of personal subject acting throughout time in different ways and revealing God in a variety of forms" (116; see his citation from AH 4.9.1 on p. 115). And I would still concur with Houssiau that the logos spermatikos should not be conflated with the theme of pagan borrowings from Moses, as Behr does on 108-9.

I believe that Behr is onto something important with his thesis about the argument of Scripture and its central role in understanding ante...