Tenth Wednesday after Pentecost
An incidental God thing (maybe): I was reading my daily five verses of Hebrew Bible today. I finally finished Judges and I'm now into 1 Samuel. Remember yesterday's blog on "Nine O'Clock in the Morning." The bystanders thought the Apostles were drunk because they were speaking in other tongues. This morning I was reading 1 Samuel 1:12ff. Here's the English:
"As [Hannah] continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought she was drunk. So Eli said to her, 'How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.' But Hannah said, 'No, my Lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord."
By evening Hannah was no longer sad but had gained peace.
Now to our subject for this Wednesday, theology day. While the early church was not all that concerned about canon or Biblical interpretation, they were concerned about right belief. The words "right belief" in Greek are ortho doxy. The most central question for the Christians in the late third and early fourth centuries was the relationship between Christ and God. Was Christ equal to God or subordinate to God. Support for both views could be found in the New Testament, The short of the Arian controversy is this. The Arians, led by Bishop Arius, believed that Christ was the divine Son of God but was subordinate to God. The Orthodox, as they would later come to be called, led by Bishop Athanasius believed that Christ and God were equal, and the Holy Spirit was equal too. The emperor Constantine called an ecumenical council to decide the issue. This took place in 325 AD in the town of Nicea in what is now central Turkey. The Orthodox won the vote. The result was the Nicene Creed, which made the equality of God and Christ crystal clear. Arianism did persist for several centuries in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire but Orthodoxy triumphed. By the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, the full equality of the three persons of the Trinity was established.
Many of you have heard me tell this story before in Sunday School. As I was writing yesterday's blog, something new hit me. I wrote about Peter quoting Joel 2:27-28 as he, Peter, spoke to the crowd on the day of Pentecost. I was struck by the total equality of male and female, slave and free in Joel's prophecy and in early Christianity, an equality unheard of in that time. It was an equality that Jesus preached.
Christian equality was totally at odds with the prevailing Roman cultural values. Romans thought entirely in terms of domination and subordination in all relationships. Women were subordinate to men; slaves subordinate to their masters; Romans dominating every other ethnic group. As we'll see in our study of Acts, Romans were threatened by Christian values. Romans valued strength above all. Christians took care of the handicapped. Romans displayed their strength in war. Christians were essentially pacifists. Christians thought all ethnic groups were equal. I could go on, but we'll see all of this as Acts unfolds.
Is it this Christian value of equality that led the Bishops at Nicea and all the great Christian thinkers before them to come to the conclusion that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were completely equal? Your retort to that question might be, "No, it was God who led them to think that way." That's true, but God uses "a great cloud of witnesses," with the accumulation of brilliant thought over the centuries to bring us the "The Pattern of Christian Truth."
Tomorrow we will think about one of the remaining vestiges of Christian inequality--Holy Communion--and what Coronavirus might do to change that.
Faithfully,
Christian
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