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gnostics would appeal to a special revelation from heaven to prove their point.
I believe in God Almighty And in Christ Jesus, his only Son, our Lord Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried And the third day rose from the dead Who ascended into heaven And sits on the right hand of the Father Whence he comes to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost The holy church The remission of sins The resurrection of the flesh The life everlasting.
This God, he said, was only concerned for the Jewish people. He was prepared to destroy all other people. In contrast, the Christian’s God was a God of grace and love for all, who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, his Son. Because he believed that the God of the Old Testament loved the Jews exclusively, Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and also those New Covenant writings that he thought favored Jewish readers—for example Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews.
Montanus’ doctrine of the new age of the Spirit suggested that the Old Testament period was past, and that the Christian period centering in Jesus had ended. The prophet claimed the right to push Christ and the apostolic message into the background. The fresh music of the Spirit could override important notes of the Christian gospel; Christ was no longer central. In the name of the Spirit, Montanus denied that God’s decisive and normative revelation had occurred in Jesus Christ.
Gnosticism demonstrated that the Christian pursuit of culture can go too far.
“good press” in Christian circles because he was the most savage of the persecutors of the church.
No one seems to know exactly why, but Diocletian, two years before the end of his highly effective reign, suddenly ordered the most vicious of all persecutions of the Christians.
His court was full of Christian officials and his wife, Prisca, and his daughter, Valeria, were considered Christians.
Christians said he was the original instigator of the purge.
The pagans themselves, however, were sickened by so much bloodshed.
When on 28 October 312 he achieved his brilliant victory over the troops of Maxentius, Constantine looked upon his success as proof of the power of Christ and the superiority of the Christian religion.
Some historians have considered Constantine’s “conversion” a purely political maneuver. Plenty of paganism remained. He conspired; he murdered; he even retained his title Pontifex Maximus as head of the state religious cult.
But for the greater part of its long history the place has been known as Constantine’s city, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine (or eastern Roman) Empire.
Prior to 312, Christianity had been outlawed and persecuted. Suddenly it was favored and pampered. Constantine thrust it into public life. As a result, the church faced a totally new mission in the world.
Prior to Constantine’s conversion, the church consisted of convinced believers.
This threatened to produce not only shallowness and permeation by pagan superstitions but also the secularization and misuse of religion for political purposes.
By 380, rewards for Christians had given way to penalties for non-Christians.
We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with divine judgment.
Ambrose had hit upon the weapon—the threat of excommunication—which the Western church would soon use again and again to humble princes.
But orthodox merely means correct; catholic is a word for universal.
OF ALL the things that Christians say about God, the most distinctive is that God is three persons.
Christians themselves are hard pressed to explain what they mean when they sing of the “blessed Trinity.” Most are content to treat the doctrine as a piece of sublime mystery.
With such mysteries to disagree upon, it wasn’t long before everyone was calling somebody else a heretic.
What is the orthodox Christian understanding of the Triune God?
The same believers who, while Diocletian and Galerius ruled, had been the victims of terrible persecution, were demanding now that their fellow Christians who differed from them on points of doctrine be suppressed or banished from their churches by the power of the state.
To Arius, when Christians called Christ God, they did not mean that he was deity except in a sort of approximate sense.
He was a created Being—the first created Being and the greatest, but nevertheless himself created.
Arius wrote, “The Son has a beginning, but . . . God is w...
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Bishop Alexander, however, would have none of it.
condemned Arius’ teaching and excommunicated the former pastor.
So, in 325, he called for a council to meet at Nicea not far from Nicomedia in Asia Minor.
Most of the 300 or so bishops had fresh memories of the days of persecution.
He spoke briefly to the churchmen, reminding them that they must come to some agreement on the questions that divided them. Division in the church, he said, was worse than war. Having made his point, he stepped aside, committing the resolution of the conflict into the hands of the church leaders.
The struggle with Arianism itself was settled quickly.
Thus, there emerged that Nicene Creed, which to this day is the standard of orthodoxy in the Roman, Eastern, Anglican, and some other churches:
believe in One GOD THE FATHER Almighty;
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one LORD JESUS CHRIST, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds. God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried; and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended
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Not long after the Council of Nicea a moderate group, sometimes called the Semi-Arians, broke away from the strict Arians and attempted to give a new interpretation to the “one substance” statement. They defended the use of homoios, meaning “similar,” to describe the Word’s relation to the Father.
At stake was the full deity of Jesus Christ and the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity.
These are all fascinating ideas, and under certain circumstances might be useful as illustrations of the Trinity. But they miss completely the personal element in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Theologians usually point out that three persons can become so close they may be said to share a common life.
social analogy.
a person may have several distinct functions such as mind, emotions, and will.
psychological analogy.
one Godhead in three “persons.”
In Trinitarian thought the “mask” is not worn by God to hide but to reveal his true character.
But if we speak about the mystery that is God, we must speak in analogies,
Peter responded, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. He is more than a subject for Christian study: he is the object of Christian devotion.
