Inside of the oldest church in Egypt We have a significant cast of characters when we talk about 4th-5th-century controversies. It might be helpful if we first listed them up front, sort of like a Russian novel giving all the main players and their relationships in a list before the story gets started. The interesting thing about really believing that God is involved in history, not just back then there, but in an ongoing way—speaking, acting, moving, informing, shaping, inspiring,... Read more
The brouhaha began because people wanted to understand, they wanted to explain, they wanted to feel comfortable with mystery. Perfectly understandable. When I teach church history courses, I try to help us all appreciate the value that heretics bring to the table. [Don’t unsubscribe just yet…hang with me.] None of our early thinkers planned to be a heretic, scheming and wringing hands in evil glee at the prospect of skewing truth and making a mess of good Christian doctrine. Early... Read more
We may wonder why all this Trinitarian fuss arises in the 4th century… 300 years after Christ. Why didn’t they figure all this out long before? I don’t propose to give you 300 years of church history in this post, but let me give you some handles on those years that can help explain why the Creed was written when it was. The first thing we have to recognize is that for most of those years, being a Christian could... Read more
When Anatolios tells us that there are two fundamental principles that must undergird our explorations of the history around early church Trinitarian thinking, he’s giving us two archaeological ‘findings’. That is, as historians scour the documents of the first centuries of the church, they find two commonalities in all the talk about the Trinity, the nature of God, and the divinity of Christ. Anatolios is telling us that there are, essentially, two ‘items’ in the layer of early church history... Read more
We’re exploring the idea of a Christian spirituality that is more thoroughly grounded in the Trinity, a teaching that is difficult, sometimes cryptic, and all too often inconsequential in actual Christian life and practice. We’re using Khaled Anatolios’ book (Retrieving Nicaea) as our guide, but his book is not primarily a theological study of Trinitarian doctrine. This is a good place to pick up on the pearly gates image from our last post. My concern (not necessarily Anatolios’) is that... Read more
In our travelogue thus far, Anatolios has been laying some groundwork for our understanding of the Trinity by pointing out some very common perspectives that he thinks are defective in some way. (And if you notice, on the right hand column of these posts, there is a menu of earlier posts for your rereading reference.) First, we considered the idea that the truth that God is mystery means we can know nothing, really, about him except what he has done... Read more
If our first contemporary approach to Trinitarian spirituality led to an essential discontinuity between God’s actions and God’s being, this second modern approach does the exact opposite. That is, it conflates God’s action and God’s being, it collapses them into the same thing. But wait, isn’t that what we wanted in our last post? Some recognition that God’s actions said something true and essential about God’s being? Yes, that’s exactly what we need. And this seems to provide just that.... Read more
To be a Christian in the Traditional sense means to be Trinitarian. They have always gone together. We have not always had the language we use to describe ourselves as Trinitarian. The word “Trinity” (trinitas) was probably coined by a north African thinker by the name of Tertullian, who was born around A.D. 160. He didn’t “invent” the idea; he simply found a word that was trying to express what the Church had already been teaching and practicing. That is,... Read more
Note to Reader: This series on Trinitarian Spirituality explores the history and spirituality behind the shaping of the Nicene Creed using Khaled Anatolios’ Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) as guide and inspiration. It’s best to begin at the beginning: An Introduction. ___________________________ The classic terms in historical and theological studies in regard to the Trinity are in Greek: ousia and hypostases. Ousia means, roughly, substance; hypostases means, roughly, existence.... Read more
Trinitarian spirituality? What does that mean? And this? What does this mean? “The Trinity is the space in which Christian life takes place.” Of course, we’re all for the Trinity. Whatever that means. We get a sermon on it once a year (in the Anglican tradition), on Trinity Sunday (which falls on 3 June this year). Most of these sermons gently and respectfully work their way around actual teaching about the Trinity—as though it were some kind of large... Read more
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