Den Nikænske Bekendelse og homoousien

Abstract

This article discusses the Nicene Creed with special regard to the concept of homoousios (consubstantiation), which Jean-Luc Nancy recently has claimed to be the defining moment of Western philosophy and the self-deconstructive dynamic of Christianity. While Adolf Martin Ritter, Pier Franco Beatrice, Christopher Stead, Heinrich Dörrie, Eberhard Jüngel, Thomas F. Torrance, and others provide theological and historical accounts of the Nicene Creed, this article explores a possible contemporary philosophical interpretation of the Nicene homoousios as the concept of the “concept” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Science of Logic. Michael Theunissen’s social philosophical reconstruction of the Hegelian “concept” as a theory of communicative freedom articulates the strong identity of the self and the other as two distinct moments implied in the Johanine word: “for God is love” (1 John 4, 7). The homoousios should be construed as the unity of freedom and love beyond indifference (Gleichgültigkeit) and dominance (Herrschaft) in Hegel’s critical account of metaphysics. Homoousios, then, is the normative ideal and signature of modernity, which in Hegel’s philosophy of the Spirit indicates the movement of the concept from substance to subjectivity as the self-movement of divine love.