Hey.
Had my first real offical class with Father Josiah yesterday. Although its a class on Islam we pretty much talk about whatever comes up. For the class I read the entierty of the Qu'ran and its interesting what Muhammid's veiws about Christianity were. He felt that his book was a completion or addendum to the Old and New Testiments of the Christian Bible. He did however have a really hard time with the Christian idea of the trinity. It is pretty interesting to note that M's contact with the Christian faith was limited to heritics (the Nestorians) who had been kicked out of the Roman church of that time(~600ad).
This lead to a discusion on the nature of christ and the trinty (Nestorus and his followers believed that Chirst had two personalities, one divine and one human and that these two natures acted indipendently of each other creating this idea that Jesus was a Schizophrenic. It is a misunderstanding of the fact that Jesus was God and Jesus was Human. (I know it can be hard to wrap your brain around, if you want an explination of the question of Jesus' human and divine natures then send me a message and I'll post some stuff. There were seven giant meetings of the church where they prayed, seached scriptues, and hammered out the answer to the question Jesus asked of Peter "who do you say that I am?") But the question of these giant church meetings called the "Ecumenical Counsels" brought us to the split of the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church and the discusion of a single Greek word...
Fileoque... of the Son
Now the concept of the Trinity is pretty interesting, but like CS Lewis says, most people shut down at any mention of numbers and personalities. (For a great book to read I recomend Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. The last section of the book called Beyond Personality deals quite heavily with the trinity.) For a couple thousand years the Jews belived that there was one God. It was the first thing that was leaned as a child. It was recited in the Sha'ma out of the book of Deuteronomy. "Hear oh Isreal, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one..." (Deut 6:4) How does the Idea of the trinity fit into that? Father, Son, Holy Spirit, but yet all one God?
I'm not the best writer in the world and Im kinda shooting from the hip but there are two parts to God, just as there is to every one of us. There is the inside and the outside. The inside part of God consists of all that God IS. If you had to fill in the blank what would you say. "God is _____." Holy? Love? Righteous? Big? Active? these are all adjectives that describe who God is. These atributes apply to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Theologians (guys who sit around and think hard about God) call this the ontological Trinity, those things which apply to God as a whole. Take one of the attributes and it applies equally to the Father or the Son or the Spirit.
On the other hand you have all the things that God does. Take for example the story of the baptism of Jesus. The Son comes out of the water, the Holy Spirit decends like a dove, and the Father's voice is heard from above. All of the actions are seperated, the Spirit does one thing, the Father another, and the Son still something else. Everyone has their role to play. And its not just at the baptism of Jesus its all thoughout the scriptures any time that God DOES something it can usually be atributed specifically to either the Son or the Spirit or the Father but not all of them together. This plays out even in our own daily lives. When we pray we are praying TO God the Father, THROUGH God the Son, by the URGING of the Spirit inside of us. This is called the Ecconomic Trinity.
Now don't hear me wrong there is but one Trinity, one God, one Father, one Son, one Spirit. These two concepts are just a way of catagorizing diffrent truths about God. Every truth about God fits pretty nicly into one of these two areas, either the Ontilogical aspect or the Economic aspect of God.
Now with all this being said, lets take a look at a line from the Nicene Creed which is a short statement of what the majority of Christian hold to be true.
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord,
and the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,"
That is what it looks like today. But until the 900's it looked like this.
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord,
and the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father,"
Notice the difrence its missing this phrase "and the son." This creed was put together by the brightest minds of the time in one of the church counsel meetings, but was changed by one of the Roman popes. The other 4 major churches at the time didnt like this at all and when the other churches went to meet with the pope all they got was a sit down and shut up from his people. The eastern church became what we call the Eastern Orthodoz church and the Roman chuch became the Holy Roman Catholic church and this split became know as the great schism.
(All this background for me to tell you a story...Yikes)
So Father Josiah, being an Eastern Orthodox Preist, follows the origional way of the Creed. When sitting in his office yesterday I had a sort of light bulb tuned on in my head. If it is true, where does the Fileoque doctrine fit in? That's the question for today. More to come...
Adam
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