The Greek word hypothesis (ὑπόθεσις; literally, “putting under”) was the term used in classical stage drama for the summary of a storyline. A dramatist would propose – or presuppose – a plot, thus setting a play’s “hypothesis,” and from that overarching idea create the other elements that would go into making up the eventual production. In time, the word “hypothesis” came to mean “supposition” or “presupposition,” and was employed in philosophy, mathematics, and science. It’s a word that was also used early in Christian theology, most notably by the great Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 – c. 202), to distinguish between the differing presuppositions of the orthodox apostolic church and the variety of often bizarre heterodox offshoots that proliferated in his era. (It should be noted – especially for the sake of those who accept without question the current and dubious popular cliché that multiple “christianities” existed from the very beginning rather than the broadly diverse but loosely unified church for which we have ample evidence – that these eccentric offshoots were headed by individuals who left the church of their own volition; nor was there any organized ecclesiastical authority in the second century with sufficient power to expel them “officially,” much less “persecute” them.) My interest in this post is to pick up on the theological use of the word, as Irenaeus would have understood it, meaning the presupposition that informs all that is believed and done in the church’s shared life: the indispensable ὑπόθεσις than which nothing more basic is needed, assuming that we can trust its sufficiency. Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies – “heresy” in this case meaning something along the lines of a “chosen party” or alternative “philosophical school”) was written precisely to demonstrate that – if one sought to be a follower of Christ – the church that he represented indeed possessed that sufficiency: trustworthy credentials, the right “storyline,” the soundest hypothesis, the purest tradition. The other “parties” – latecomers all, who had dispensed with scripture in the name of allegedly “oral traditions,” only to reject “tradition” as well when it was shown that there was no credible basis for their claims – had botched the story, fabricating a “Jesus” to suit themselves (a problem we still have today, in which there’s a “historical Jesus” to suit every peculiar taste). But my focus in what follows isn’t on apologetics so much as it is concentrated on prayer and contemplation.
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