between the changing realm of time and the eternal unchanging God. This made it difficult for some Christian thinkers to understand how an unchanging God could have entered the world of time by becoming a man in Jesus Christ; to solve the problem, they were tempted to say that Christ was something less than absolutely divine. It was not until the Arian controversy of the 4th century that the Church finally purged this “temptation” out of its theology.4 (ii) Platonism’s teaching on the superiority of the soul and the spiritual life over the body and physical life held powerful attractions for
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