Scripture and God in Christianity

all saw the Father in the Son. For the Father is the invisible of the Son, but the Son is the visible
of the Father." 508 And again "But God being all mind and all Logos what he thinks he says and
what he says he thinks. For his thought is Logos and Logos is mind and mind comprehending all
things is itself the Father." 509 In short the Logos is God but God revealed and not God unapproachable,
inaccessible and apart from the world.
Clement of Alexandria, in spite of his Platonist inclinations, to Kelly "was a moralist rather than
a systematic theologian", 510 takes an almost identical course in determining Jesus' relationship
with God. Jesus to him is neither derived nor a secondary or subordinate divine being but God
divine in his own rights. Bigg observes that "the idea of subordination is strictly secondary in
Clement. The text 'None is good save One' does not mean to him what it meant to his scholar." 511
In the tenth chapter of his " Protrepticus " Clement calls him " the truly most manifest God." 512
The Son was not generate, "His generation from the Father is without beginning (`the Father is
not without His Son'); and He is essentially one with Him, since the Father is in Him and He in
the Father." 513 Bigg observes that "Clement's mode of statement is such as to involve necessarily
the Unity, Equality, and Eternity of the First and Second Persons. It has been asserted, that he
hardly leaves sufficient room for a true distinction of Hypostasis." 514 He further observes that "So
complete is the union, that he does not hesitate to transfer to the Son the peculiar titles of the Father.
If the one is `beyond all intelligible', so also is the other; if the one is Almighty, so also is
the other; and, following the example of Philo and Justin, Clement applies to the Son passages of
the Old Testament, where Lord is employed as the substitute for Jehovah." 515 Like Ireneaus he
declares the Son to be God in relations, " through the Logos God creates and governs and reveals.
In himself he is far away and inaccessible, but in Logos he is near and pervades all beings." 516
One can see the difficulties involved in quoting Clement as the Christian intellectual thinker who
insisted upon the sheer transcendence of the Deity. To him "Jesus alone is both God and Man. He
who is God became Man, that we might become gods." 517 It has been doubted whether he ascribed
to Jesus a human soul but it is certain that he insisted that "His Flesh was not wholly like
ours..." 518 In view of such a manifest insistence upon the unity and equality of Christ with God, it
is extremely difficult to present Clement as the herald and hero of the Christian transcendental
God Paradigm. Many a modern scholars seem to make such an assertion about Clement.
Kelly, however, argues that Clement "clearly distinguishes the Three, and the charge of modalism,
based on his lack of any technical term to designate the Persons, is groundless; and if he
appears to subordinate the Son to the Father and the Spirit to the Son, this subordination implies
no inequality of being, but is the corollary of his Platonic conception of a graded hierarchy." 519
Grillmeier argues that "It is true that Clement has repeatedly been suspected of docetism, but he
consistently maintains the reality of the human nature of Christ, though at the same time his tendency
to spiritualize seems to make the reality of the incarnation merely relative. Attempts have
also been made to interpret the figure of Christ which Clement presents as the union of the Logos
with a mere unsouled fleshly nature, a position where the special significance of the Logos in Alexandrian
christology would become manifest. Put in these terms, however, such an interpretation
is mistaken. The tradition of Christ's soul is clearly still so vigorous that even the teaching of
animation through the Logos cannot obscure it. Nevertheless, we find in Clement precisely that
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