Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

Session 1: The Apostolic Age, the Ancient Church, the Apologists, and the Great Tradition 23

4. The distinctive, final, and authoritative confession of the Christian faith’s center and circumference: “The deity of Jesus Christ is the foundation of all true Christian faith. Without it, there is no true revelation of God in Jesus. Without it, the Christian doctrine of salvation is undermined” (Lane, p. 29).

C. The Theologians: the Three Cappadocians and the Schools of Alexandria and Antioch

1. History

a. Basil of Caesarea, b. (born in) 330, appointed presbyter in 364, in 370 succeeded the bishop of Caesarea

b. Gregory of Nazianzus, his father was bishop of Nazianzus, became bishop at Constantinople, defended Nicene theology in 380

c. Gregory of Nyssa, born in 335, Basil’s brother and disciple, ardent disciple of Origen, and strongest intellectually of the three, “defender of orthodoxy”

2. The Three Cappadocians:

Gregory of Nazianzus (329-89) was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers (with the brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa) who championed Trinitarian orthodoxy in the second half of the fourth century. The three Fathers are known for their defense of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, while Gregory of Nazianzus also entered more broadly into the ecclesiastical politics of his day by serving as patriarch of Constantinople and even presiding briefly over the Constantinopolitan Council of 381, which confirmed (and expanded) the Nicene Creed. Several aspects of Gregory’s teaching became very important in later Orthodox theology, especially his stress on the incomprehensibility of God and the necessity of purification for the theologian who would