Philo, allegorizing,[362] had seen the holy
Word typified in the high priest, and in Melchizedek, the priest of
the Most High; he had called it the son of God and His first-born.
Paul, dogmatizing, exalts Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, above
Melchizedek and the high priest, and calls on the Hebrews to gain
salvation by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful
human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with
the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy
wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational
dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest
philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and
Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but
they converted--one might rather say perverted--his monotheistic
theology into a dogmatic trinitarianism. They exalted the Logos, to
Philo the "God of the imperfect," and a second-best Deity, to an equal
place with the perfect God. For man, indeed, he was nearer and the
true object of human adoration. And this not only meant a departure
from Judaism; it meant a departure from philosophy. The supreme unity
of the pure reason was sacrificed no less than the unity of the
soaring religious imagination. The one transcendental God became
again, as He had been to the Greek theologians, an inscrutable
impersonal power, who was unknown to man and ruled over the universe
by His begotten son, the Logos.
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