Over two decades have passed since the publication of John Behr’s The Way to Nicaea, the first installment in his Formation of Christian Theology series (followed by volume 2: The Nicene Faith). In this work, which should now be considered a classic, Behr carefully attends to the various theological programs and controversies in the centuries preceding the Council of Nicaea. We are now on our own way to the 1700th anniversary of that council which has so shaped the faith handed down to us. What better anniversary gift to give the Church than attentive engagement, not only with the doctrinal formulas achieved at Nicaea, but principally with the Good News that gave rise to such clarifying confessions about the identity of our Lord Jesus Christ? And indeed, this is the substance of Behr’s work and, according to him, the aim of so much early Christian theological reflection: to keep the Church’s confession of faith tethered to the Gospel of God from which it is born and which is testified in Scripture. In this sense, we have before us a book that can properly be called evangelical, through and through. In Behr’s own words, “…what we will find in the Fathers studied here is a reflection on and within the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not the transformation of the primitive Gospel into Greek metaphysics, the development of something not there from the beginning, but is rather the deepening understanding of what is given once and for all.” (6-7)

In The Way to Nicaea, Behr invites the reader, simply, to take seriously what is said by early Church teachers about Jesus Christ, to allow their writings to set the terms regarding what was at stake theologically in those ancient debates; this as opposed to allowing the – certainly very real – political dynamics at play behind the texts to “explain the theological points made…” (5) Interestingly, the commitment to giving priority to the very words of the primary texts we have at our disposal, is analogous to what Behr argues is the common commitment of (many) of the early Church Fathers themselves in their diverse reflections on the identity of Christ: whatever can be said about the person of Jesus Christ must be said in the grammar of Holy Scripture, it must attend to the words we are given there. Anyone who has sat in a seminar room with John Behr, gathered around a text, knows that his favorite and resounding question is, simply, “What does it say?”

That figures like Origen and Irenaeus recognize the normative status of Scripture for making christological claims, is a welcome and perhaps reassuring observation for us evangelical Christians, insofar as it resonates with our existing commitments vis-à-vis the authority of the Bible. The rationale for this confession, however, which is itself christological, will be less familiar to many of us and perhaps even scandalous to some in the extent to which it both exalts Scripture and may appear to diminish the divinity of Christ:

Behr argues that, for figures like Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeaus of Lyons, there is a strong identification between Scripture itself (the Law and the Prophets) as the Word of God and the person of Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh. In their view, Behr argues, the incarnation refers not to the fleshless Logos, the second person of the Trinity, taking on human flesh, but, rather, to the Word of God which was always present – though obscure – in the Law and the Prophets made visible, embodied, in Jesus Christ. He writes, for example, “Irenaeus’ focus is not on a continuous history of the Word of God, from the ‘Old Testament’ to the ‘New Testament,’ in the sense of a continuity of personal subject acting throughout time in different ways and revealing God in a variety of forms, but rather on the unchanging and eternal identity of the Word of God as the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.” (116) This, the question of the identity of the Word of God, and its construal in relation to the Passion, on the one hand, or its subjective “preexistence,” on the other, is perhaps the crucial question which continues to occupy Behr until today. Behr’s insistence on the priority which must be given to the former option potentially invites this twofold anxiety: Defining Christ’s “preexistence” in terms of his literary presence as God’s Word in the “Old Testament” both diminishes him of his true divinity by stripping him of his eternal personality and overly divinizes Scripture by identifying it with the Word of God proper.

A critical question, from Behr’s perspective, that might be posed to those with such anxieties – and a question that might force Protestants to either double down or back down on their commitment to sola Scriptura – is whether these anxieties are in fact shaped by Scripture’s own grammar. To what extent is our understanding of divinity itself – our doctrine of God – shaped by our own assumptions about what it must mean for God to be God (and, consequently, for Jesus to be divine), rather than by the revelation given in the Gospel of Jesus Christ? At the same time, it does seem unavoidable that we will have working presuppositions about divinity. Indeed, one of Behr’s own critical comments about describing the incarnation in terms of the sojourn of a fleshless subject into the enfleshed Nazarene is that it is “crudely materialistic,” speaking of Christ in terms of the “structure” or “composition” of his being. (see p. 238) The charge of “crude materialism” seems to be more of a philosophical critique than a scriptural one. There is, in other words, a working presupposition, not necessarily derived from Scripture, about what is appropriate or inappropriate to say regarding the divine. Given that this is so, the way to think about the relation between kerygmatic theology – theological reflection that follows from the Gospel of Jesus Christ – and philosophy ought to be understood in terms of their proper ordering rather than as irreconcilably antithetical. Behr challenges us to think about the true starting point and end of theological reflection. And this might be the beginning of a reply to the query of Reformed theologian Michael Allen, who, commenting on Behr’s more recent John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel (2019) – where Behr further develops some of the same themes –  wonders whether Behr is “perhaps unnecessarily antagonistic to accounts of the pre-incarnate Word.” (IJST 22.4 [2020]: 566)

Reflection on God and everything in relation to God is normed by a canon, a rule of faith according to which Christian theology is not arbitrary: it is fundamentally about the God revealed in this person according to these Scriptures. Behr writes, “The assertion that there is such a thing as right faith came to be expressed, by the end of the second century, in terms of the canon (rule) of faith or truth, where canon does not mean an ultimately arbitrary list of articles of belief which must be adhered to, or a list of authoritative books which must be accepted, but is rather a crystallization of the hypothesis of Scripture itself.” (15) This crystallization is to be found in the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel: “For Irenaeus, the canon of truth is the embodiment or crystallization of the coherence of Scripture, read as speaking of the Christ who is revealed in the Gospel, the apostolic preaching of Christ ‘according to Scripture.’” (36) Christian theology thus takes for granted that the apostles give us the lens according to which the Scriptures are to be rightly understood and that that lens is itself in accordance with the Scriptures. Behr writes, “It is the apostles alone who have brought the revelation of Christ to the world, though what they preach is already announced by Scripture – the Law and the Prophets.” (39) The Scriptures, then, like the theology which follows them, have a particular aim: to bear witness to the God revealed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But because this Gospel is always revelation in accordance with the Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets never become disposable. We do not get to shelve the “Old Testament” because we have been given its crystallization in the apostolic proclamation of Jesus Christ. Rather, we rely on the Scriptures precisely because their embodiment has been announced in the kerygma: to them we return again and again for witness to this Lord. Describing “what is established as normative Christianity in the second century,” Behr writes – in another phrase of peculiar boldness and scandal – “If God acts through His Word, then that Word needs to be heard, to be read, to be understood – the relationship with God is, in a broad sense, literary.” (15)

It all sounds quite classically Protestant. Of course, there are other Protestant impulses on the basis of which one might protest. It seems unavoidable that such an account privileges an intellectual elite: only those who can read and reason and have access to these texts can have a proper relation with God. Is it not the case that teachers of the Word, in this scheme, become what the Roman Catholic priesthood represented for the Reformers: mediators between God and humanity by another name than that of Jesus Christ? One may equally protest, wishing to preserve the glory of God in distinction from God’s creation, that such overidentification between God’s Word and the words of Scripture constrains divine freedom. Does not God’s Word become manipulable if the place where we meet it is confined to the text of Scripture?

As with the later Nicene debates, what is at stake theologically hangs just as much on distinction as it does on sameness. Whatever ομοούσιος means, it does not mean that the names of the Father and the Son can be used interchangeably, as if there is no distinction between them. One could run wild with the identification between Christ and Scripture and say that, since Christ is divine, God is the Bible, and that, consequently, our relationship with God is secured by our literary acumen. But this is neither what Behr nor what the Fathers under examination are saying. What is being said is both simple and necessary if Christian theology is to be Christian in any meaningful sense: the Gospel just is the place where we are given to know who God is in Jesus Christ and the apostles of this Gospel name this Christ as being in accordance with the Scriptures. The distinctions to be drawn between the various nouns in such a claim self-evidently point to the Father’s and the Son’s transcendence of text alone and move us to return to what Behr’s own text says, which is that “literary” is to be taken “in a broad sense” to include reading, yes, but also hearing and understanding. How can Christianity even begin to be articulated apart from these categories? God is not confined to the Scriptures but, in grace, he gives himself to be known in his Son, in accordance with these Scriptures. And this revelation is God’s glory precisely because divinity itself is manifest in the giving of God’s own Son.

As we find ourselves on the way to the anniversary of Nicaea, reflecting on its own crystallizing terms, there is surely no better place to begin than where God has given Godself to be known once and for all, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Behr’s volume challenges us to think afresh about this starting point and, consequently, about the task of theology as a whole.