In praise of a theological mediocrity

It was "the developed neo-Nicene theology of the Trinity and its concept of the hypostases that could for the first time provide the necessary conceptual and intellectual instrumentarium for a tension-free interpretation of the co-enthronment of Christ.  Only when the unity of God is thought together with [(in)] his simultaneous differentiation into three hypostases can the enthronement of Christ be expressed on the far side of [1] a naïve conception of the bisellium (and its tendency towards ditheism) [on the one hand] and [2] an allegorical solution to [the difficulties posed by] this passage [on the other]. . . .

     "And yet—and this is the surprising discovery—the requisite linkage of Cappadocian terminology to the interpretation of Ps 110:1 is first found not in the leading theological minds of the epoch, but in a [single] work of a rather (and I say this advisedly) 'average thinker' above all, in [the Ancoratus of] the already oft-mentioned Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, . . . where passages on the enthronement of Father and Son are cited and then for the very first time interpreted in a sense consistent with the [new] doctrine of the three hypostases:

The Father sits in heaven, but '[the] Son sits at the right hand of the Father'. . . .  With this it should be obvious [that the Son] is an hypostasis and [the Spirit] is an hypostasis.

Only against the background of this conceptual solution can the Bishop of Cyprus speak in one breath of the 'one Godhead', the εἰς Θεός, without turning the 'co-enthronement of Christ' into an episode in salvation history.  By means of this complicated conceptual apparatus he can place the statement εἰς Θεός beside Ps 110:1 for the first time [in history] without tension.  Unoriginal [(wenig origineller theologischer Denker)] though he was, Epiphanius obviously realized that only a sessio ad dexteram interpreted against the background of the neo-Nicene formula could point the way between the Scylla of monarchianism and the Charybdis of ditheism, and he did so when he interpreted the text as [a] confutation of Sabellian phantasies of unity [on the one hand] and [the] Arian Christology of subordination [on the other]."

     Christoph Markschies, "»Sessio ad dexteram«:  Bemerkungen zu einem altchristlichen Bekenntnismotiv in der christologischen Diskussion der altkirchlichen Theologen," in Le Trône de Dieu, ed. Marc Philonenko, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament 69 (Tübingen:  J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), 296-297 (252-317).