Arianism vs the Trinity, Transcript

Arianism vs the Trinity - Centre Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK9aYVPlfZQ

Transcript:

(00:02) our topic tonight is arianism versus the Trinity so that's two complex words arianism and the Trinity so we're going to have to Define some of what we're talking about in order to actually make any comparison so what is arianism so a couple years ago landra and I and Mike were able to go to the city of Ravenna in Italy which has always been very high on my list of places to go it is not high on most people's places because they don't think of Ravenna they think of Florence and Venice and some Milan and so forth but Ravenna is really important in a very particular and

(00:47) strange time which is the late Antiquity the at the as the Roman Empire in the west is falling this became the capital of the West Roman Empire and then after the West Roman Empire fell this is the capital of the visigo I'm sorry ostrogothic Kingdom that replaced the Roman state and then actually after the East Roman Empire after the byzantines conquered Italy from the ostrogas it became again the provincial capital of Italy when Italy now is reduced to being a province of the Byzantine Empire and so it actually has the strange thing of is in this time period when

(01:29) um the Roman state is collapsing this is a time period when um very few buildings anywhere else are being built and now there's a new city that is built in in this sort of style when nothing else is being built anyway so one of the interesting components of Ravenna is that a bunch of these buildings were built not by the late Romans the end of the Roman Empire or by the byzantines but in between when it is the capital of the ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy and so theodoric the great the great king of the ostrogas whose capital was Ravenna he was an Aryan Christian and so he

(02:13) built Aryan churches he built an area in Palace he built his Mausoleum which is a really amazing interesting concrete thing nine-sided building very unusual classically and he built a baptistry and so a baptistry was a kind of building that was um poor baptisms and in the early years of Christianity baptisms and baptistries was a big thing because most Christians were actually converts initially because most people were not born Christian originally it's only after the Empire becomes fully Christian that you know it becomes more like today where you're just baptizing children or young people

(02:58) babies sometimes and so this is a mosaic at the Dome of the baptistry depicting Jesus and we have to kind of understand I mean it's not entirely clear what makes this Aryan as opposed to what makes this um what would it what would a an orthodox or Catholic baptistry looked like and part of it might be um you know this is kind of a a non-manly non-muscular nude unbearded Jesus on the one hand and so that might be part of it and so it's kind of an interesting so idea and we'll talk about what arianism is but

(03:47) this is just a first image I wanted to show you okay so arianism with an i is not to be confused with the word or with arianism with the why and indeed the word arianism with an i has nothing to do with the word arianism with a Y so arianism with a y is derived from the Aryans who were an Indo-European and into Iranian people who entered into Northern India as conquerors from the steps of Central Asia around 1500 BC um and unfortunately the Nazis and before them um essentially white supremacists pseudoscientists pseudo-historians

(04:42) um picked up on the idea they came up with a very false reading of history that um that the indo-europeans were some so Indo-European is a is a scholarly created name for a people that is theorized based on um on philology so the fact that all of these languages from India to Europe and many places in between are related to one another and so Latin and Greek and Russian and Sanskrit and Persian you know and and Celtic and they're all related languages and they have branched off and are very different from one

(05:28) another but um people in the 19th century realized that there's a lot of words that sound very similar in ancient Sanskrit as what sounds in ancient Greek and ancient Latin and so forth and so anyway so the pseudoscientists the white supremacists assumed that this is a also an ER white race and that's why they ran off the steps and conquered so many places and spread around somewhere and so forth that's not the case at all and so unfortunately because that was part of the Nazis white supremacist racist

(06:03) ideology they adopted the word Aryan from this indo-iranian people in India and then they also appropriated an Indian symbol the swastika which is an ancient um Aryan or Indian religious symbol which unfortunately has been totally totally ruined by the Nazis of course um anyway and so this is an example a statue that was at the entrance of the Reich trancery put there by the Nazis in 1939 which is essentially showing Aryan racial characteristics that they wanted to remote or so forth so like I say the Nazis appropriated the actual areas the Aryans were real people

(06:48) the indo-euran people they don't have anything to do with debunked ideas about racial Supremacy okay so the arianism that we're going to talk about tonight aryanism with an eye is named for a guy called Arius and so Arius was an alexandrian Christian priest and he's pictured here at left being punched or slapped at the Council of nicaea in the year 325 by none other than Saint Nicholas Good Old Saint Nick Santa Claus so we don't always think of Santa Claus as having a a rotten temper I mean he is quite mean to Rudolph and the Rudolph special and he's a little bit bigoted in the Rudolph special but

(07:33) in any event he's his as a saint he has a reputation for generosity and kindness and so forth but also apparently no tolerance for Aries and aryanism according to Legend anyway okay so at the beginning um of the fourth century areas this priest from Alexandria Egypt was an influential Christian Theologian Arias was alive at the time Christianity was coalescing from multiple local communities that were effectively all autonomous from each other so the way christianities had emerged they had grown and a diversity

(08:19) of ways we've gone through a lot about how in the earliest years there was no one way to be a Christian there were multiple interpretations that were very different and often very much at odds with each other and so now this is kind of a time period when some of the um some of the different major Rivals are waning so the Jewish law-abiding Christians are now been very much sidelined they still exist but they aren't as important and that is also true for some of the other groups like um uh the gnostics and so forth there are still gnostics but they are not going to be that's not the way things are going

(09:00) to go at this point um Christianity is the the mainstream of Christianity is already sort of backing around the ideas of what we call the proto-orthodox what's going to eventually become the Orthodox slash Catholic the Nicene tradition but there is still a massive amount of diversity within this and effectively all of the little Christian communities are functionally independent of each other so what's happening in Alexandria is under the under the um jurisdiction of the patriarch of Alexandria who is pretty much autonomous

(09:39) in his own right doesn't really have anything that he can do or say about the what's happening over in the bishopric you know of uh of Seville or of you know of Gaul or wherever the other places that are the Bishops in other words each independent church is their own thing so now that's coalescing with the in arius's time with the conversion of the emperor Constantine we had a whole lecture on that very recently and so now um it is coming together as a single institution that is backed by the Roman government itself

(10:15) so in this backdrop areas this is the time of christological um controversy and we'll talk about what that means areas formulated a christology and it's one that lost out in the debate process at this time so what's christology christology is the study of Christ it is essentially Christians trying to make sense of Jesus so like I say it's a technical word it's used to describe the many ways Christians have tried to make sense of the historical Jesus the Jesus Christ as described in scripture and ultimately also the idea

(10:58) that Christ is God so we have the historical Jesus of Nazareth who we talked about an awful lot we have the Divine man Jesus Christ as portrayed or actually given multiple different and contradictory portraits in the canonical scripture and the extra canonical scriptures and then finally we have the theological idea of Christ the Messiah the Savior the logos the Divine image define wisdom and so forth how do we understand the theological idea foreign in the ancient times and Middle Ages and early modern times this is before the development of the modern academic

(11:48) discipline of History so Christians largely just assumed that the events described in the gospel occurred pretty much as written so the actual historical Jesus was not part of their consideration they had no access to the historical Jesus after the last people who knew the historical Jesus died and so they only have essentially pictures of Jesus written by Christians in text you know not not real pictures they don't have any portraits until very late but in any event there's the ones that are not um they assume it's historical even if it's not

(12:27) so significant questions remain so the Christians figure sure okay Jesus was both human and divine he's a Divine man when he's portrayed in the scripture but precisely what way in the lecture we just had on Divine men we saw there's all kinds of different ways that that could happen there are demigods that are born of the Union of a a God and a human either a human man and a goddess or a God and a human woman there are people who are made into divinities so in other words that have I think of an undergo theosis there are people who have because of the

(13:11) amazing way that they live philosophically morally and ethically they essentially have a Divine spark in them and seem Divine so there are a number of ways that you could be a Divine man which way was Jesus and then also we have this understanding that sure Christ is God the logos Christ logos The Wiz holy wisdom and so forth those are God the savior is God but how does Christ God relate to the father as God the heavenly parent and so those questions are still being worked out so in the first centuries of the religion

(13:56) Christians really focused on trying to understand precisely how Jesus was a Divine man in what way was he Divine in what way was he human so was he born a man who lived such a perfect life that God made him Divine that God essentially adopted him as God's son was he born Divine and human in equal parts or was he really kind of a God the whole time or God Divine in such a way that he only appeared to be human and so some Christians in each of uh believed in each of these christological conceptions in the first and second centuries especially

(14:41) so um in general conceptions that emphasize Jesus's Humanity are called Low christology while those that emphasize his divinity are called high christology and by the way you can you can find scriptural support for both so the scriptures are all written before the development of the idea of the Trinity you can use scriptures to support that idea but they did not they were not written with that idea in mind and likewise you can use scriptural examples to support um all kinds of other things so docitism

(15:27) as we'll see and other um uh aryanism there are other all kinds of christologies can be used the scriptures to support so um for example the portrait that we have of Jesus in the kind of earthy Gospel of Mark really tries to portray Jesus's humanity and so Jesus is a guy who gets frustrated he gets angry there's all kinds of things that don't seem very um you know perfectly philosophical or or or God like how you would expect the perfect God walking around to act by contrast the Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of John seems like he's always omniscient always just passionate

(16:12) and throughout the entire narrative so you don't get the impression really that he's even human at all um in that gospel and then making that as extreme but you have both Divine and human in both but they're but they do depict different christological portraits so for the low christology the adoptionists are an example of an early Christian group that has a locust christology so many and maybe even most this might have been the the most important early or most common anyway early uh idea among most of the Christians they believe that Jesus was born a human but then was exalted by God becoming God's only

(16:55) begotten son either maybe that happened at his baptism or when he was transfigured or at the crucifixion or when he's resurrected or possibly when he ascends into heaven at one of those events at some point or other he becomes God's only begotten and because um all early Christians had a testimony that Christ lived according to scripture died according to scripture and was raised again according to scripture they used scripture which is to say the Hebrew Bible the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible they use that to look at

(17:31) what they considered to be Messianic predictions and they assumed that Jesus lived according to those because they had that assumption to begin with and so they in Psalm 2 verse 7 God the father says you are my son I have begotten you this day and so that becomes a way to understand Jesus becoming the Divine only begotten son at some point during his life and so in some versions of in some manuscript versions of the baptism of Jesus story when a voice from Heaven speaks thus this Psalm versus quoted instead of this

(18:16) is my beloved Son in whom I will please he says you are my son I have begotten you this day and that would support an adoptionist reading the idea that Jesus had begun as a man but has been adopted and then becomes exalted as a Divine being who is nevertheless not God in the sense of since God has always been God this is a man who becomes exalted as a Divine being oh god let's say simultaneously there is very high crust christology at the very other end of the spectrum uh where Christians are emphasizing

(19:00) Jesus's Divinity um and sometimes this goes so far as to extent to denying his humanity and so a group which we now call the docetists from the Greek word docane which means to seem people who think that this is an illusion or that the human Christ what Jesus walking around was simply an illusion and docent dosatis include folks like the gnostics generally they believed that Jesus only seemed human so yes it sometimes he was walking around he looked like a human other times when you look he would look very

(19:36) different and so they're in the apocryphal gospels we often have Jesus even shape-shifting and things like that and that's a docetic way of saying yes some people were fooled into thinking Jesus was human but he really only seemed human the real truth is that the whole physical world is corrupt matter is corrupt for the dose of this and the gnostics and thus it would be a Corruption of God's true son a fully spiritual being to actually take on real material flesh like all of our Sparks are are trapped

(20:16) in instead he seemed to do that as a pathway to bring us back so that we can eventually shed free of these material forms and so thus um there's even just very kind of I think uncomfortable pictures of seeing the um let's say fake or empty husk the body supposed body or illusionary body of Jesus on the cross and the true Jesus in some of these apocryphal descetic Gnostic scriptures that the true spiritual Jesus is even laughing at the image because uh because it's it's it's a joke that's never that didn't happen in any kind of real sense there was no no suffering

(21:04) okay there's then a middle path and that is usually always the path of the proto-orthodox like I say this group that is ultimately gonna win and so it's the group of people whose ideas are going to win out and become the main line of all Christianity from the 4th Century onward so this group believed that from his birth Jesus was both Divine and human they this nevertheless still left the question does Jesus who was both Divine and human does he have a single human-defined nature in other words one nature period and that is called monophysitism

(21:49) or does Jesus have two Natures after his after he begins his incarnation in other words once he's born does he have two Natures inside him a divine nature and a human nature which is diophositism okay so this is a quick pop quiz for any of you who are Christians or post-christians who are listening um so which of these two beliefs makes you a heretic if you like right now said okay you think yeah no yeah Jesus of course Jesus only has one nature he has a single fully Divine fully Human Nature or does he actually have two distinct Natures he has a fully human nature and

(22:29) a fully divine nature which one of those do you believe okay so if you said one nature then you're most likely a heretic because what they end up deciding in their very technical thing uh in uh whatever the fifth and sixth centuries is that um that Jesus has two natures and so that's a little asterisk here if you are Oriental Orthodox if you are part of the Coptic Church the uh Ethiopian Eritrea and churches the Assyrian Church the churches of the East and so forth it's the other is heresy it's then you have

(23:04) then you have my if it's a citizen which is a it's a variation on monophysitism it's a later compromise but in other words then it's not a heresy for everybody else um it would be uh in the main line anyway you have to be Orthodox by saying to Nature so it gets pretty Technical and I think actually a lot of times Christians don't even know what they're supposed to believe on these things so okay so this was a debate within the proto-arkansas thing so that adoption is docetus divide that played out earlier

(23:37) and that's at its height in the second century although it continues then that two versus one nature debate that comes later and so it said it's height in the fifth century so the Aryan controversy we're talking tonight takes place largely at the beginning of the fourth Century through the middle of the fourth Century too but it has lingering effects into the seventh centuries as we'll see uh and so let's look at what this is about so Arius is focused on Christ's relationship with God the Father how is Christ as God

(24:11) um distinct from or how do we understand the two in relation to one another so Christianity has a complex conception of God so there is Christians are absolutely monotheists Christians just like Muslims and Jews affirm that there is absolutely only one God One Source One first cause one prime mover in other words the source of all meaning meaning itself there's only one God and yet unlike Muslims and Jews where it's the conception is simpler although they also have um complexities that they don't often consider the way Christians do all the time

(25:00) um we'll talk about that later but anyway Christians have a much more immediate in front of them paradoxical understanding of God since Christians also affirm that the father or the parent is God that Christ the logos it's God God's word is God and the spirit is God and so one God only and now we've just I just said three different persons here are God so how is that logically possible so the simplest logical solution to that argument is well God the Father God the son God the Holy Spirit they're all really simply aspects of that same one God there's one God and all three of

(25:47) these that we're seeing are equal to each other they are all the same Jesus is the father Jesus is the spirit the spirit is the father all three are simply aspects of the one God so this is called modalism so in the same way that you can experience water in the form of liquid that you can drink or as a solid in the form of ice or you can boil it away as water vapor you can sometimes experience that same one God in different aspects so you can experience God in the aspect of the unknowable unseeable Creator or sometimes as God's glory God's word the son

(26:29) or through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as God but really since the holy spirit is the father in modalism it's really all the same and you're just experiencing different aspects or modes of God by the way these are heresies so so in other words these are not these were some early Christians believe but not today by and large are these parts of the Christian but I'm just saying this is a way that many Christians tried to figure this out and it's an easy way to understand it okay so there's another one so maybe Jesus is just part of the one God so

(27:05) this is what's called partialism so another strategy is to see the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit as different parts of the one God the same one God so there's a famous legendary account of Saint Patrick patron saint of Ireland who goes from ancient Britain to Ireland and he uses supposedly a shamrock you know how um most clovers are three leaf not as opposed to a four leaf clover and so the four white leaf ones are are lucky but the common ones are three leaf so he uses that to show right here that you see how that's kind of like a clubs or a three leaf clover he teaches the Irish

(27:45) the pagans Irish pagans that's how the Trinity works there's there's in fact three three persons here but it's all in one um one leaf even though it has the three circles so actually that would be if that if he was teaching that which he didn't teach that that's a later Legend it really is a problem that would be such effectively saying be teaching partialism not trinitarianism because effectively each of those three round sub Leafs is just part of the same leaf and so that's not that's not how the Trinity works that's all one that's really a one God thing and where each individual component is a sub Leaf is

(28:25) part of the rest right so another example of that is to a partialism would be trying to say something like well you know so Jesus is fully God Jesus is 100 God the father is a hundred percent God and so let's do the same way the Pacific Ocean is a hundred percent water the Atlantic Ocean is 100 water but the Pacific by itself is not a hundred percent of all the water that exists and thus what we're saying is the Pacific the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean all the water together that is the whole God but the Pacific is still its own thing and so that is

(29:03) um again partialism because what your moral is saying is that each person Christ is simply a part of the god of the whole God you know so you can see how that's different partialism so that's another way that a lot of early Christians said okay well that makes sense to me when you hold up a shamrock um but nevertheless that's a heresy okay so modalism and partialism like I say do a very good job of preserving the unity of God there's no doubt if you're saying that looking at Jesus is just part of the leaf or just the Atlantic Ocean and that God the real God is all

(29:41) ocean all water or whatever then you're really saying that you're really focused on the Oneness of God monotheism however when you go down that path you get other conceptual problems so so if Jesus is a son you need to have a father and if you were the same if it's the same being or just parts of the same being or just modes of the same being appearing how can you really be your own father or how can you really be your own son it doesn't really make any sense you're really not a father if you're only

(30:16) the father to another motive you and so forth right likewise if Jesus is simply the father in another mode or part of the same God God never really is actually doing a sacrifice now there's not God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son and so forth um because really it's just God who now becomes Jesus and is sacrificed and then leaves again you know and so it's like a mode that the one God is simply the father that's doing all that and it's complex to understand exactly why so it seems like you've got an easy logical

(30:56) solution with modalism and partialism but you know who is Jesus praying to In The Garden of Gethsemane when he's saying you know and or on the cross father forgive them or anything like that if he's the father in a different mode or a different part of him he's praying to a different part of himself or he's praying to himself in a different mode um it's hard to square that too okay so ultimately we're just going to point out here the Nicene trinitarian formula definitely devis logic and so this is how it's most easily structured right so we have

(31:34) the idea here and the hands reaching down the cons that's the unsoluble unknowable Creator the father Heavenly parent heavenly mother we can say heavenly father is God and then the Christ the logos Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is God but the father is not the son the son is not the Holy Spirit the holy spirit is not the father right and so that absolutely defies logic so the formula you know if you have a formula um that b equals A and C equals a then logically and in math and geometry by the transitive principle if B equals A and C equals eight then b equals c

(32:24) but in the doctrine of the Trinity it is asserted that b does not equal C and so therefore you can see right here in a and an equal sign logical diagram here there's an immediate logical contradiction here so as a result the final Orthodox slash Nicene conception of the Trinity that became Mainline conception in Christianity it's a paradox and right from the start um Christians have said that it has to be understood as a mystery it cannot be understood literally shouldn't be understood as being limiting or that this conception is

(33:04) somehow the totality of what God is in a very you know in a very binding kind of way rather um a phrase we use is we limit not the truth of God this is simply a human conception of how to understand uh the unknowable okay so areas however doesn't like a logical contradiction that is not um that does not suit his philosophical training he doesn't think that it makes any sense self-contradiction is kind of the beginning principle and like Aristotelian logic of of essentially having untruth so areas um formulation of how Christ relates to the

(33:49) father preserves strict monotheism and it does so by demoting Christ to being the first Divine creation of the one God so that eliminates The Logical contradiction so Christ is still Divine Christ is a Divine created being created before all the rest of creation more important than all the rest of creation but nevertheless at some point created so the Creator God the Father God brought Christ into being and so at its there are so Aries asserts there was a at some point whether or not he might have even been Before Time exists Christ was not whereas that can't be

(34:37) said for God God always was always is always shall be so only only God which is to say the father is fully eternal and so thus although Divine and full of Glory Christ isn't God in the sense of being eternal and is therefore because God is what is the only being that is eternal and infinite Christ is them is nevertheless is therefore must be infinitely less glorious than the Creator since the Creator then becomes an Aries Aries conception the soul Eternal source of all okay so we because Arius is writing um is ultimately condemned as heretical and

(35:25) therefore consigned to the Flames so one of the early um earliest first book burnings essentially of the Christian church now as it's combined together into an institution under the patronage of the emperor the first thing they do is have a big book burning they burn all of arius's writings and so unfortunately most of them do not survive however we do have a kind of a long fragment of his book The Thalia which means the banquet and that's preserved in a quotation by his enemy athanasius who was writing along book ripping on Arius but anyway in

(36:05) doing that he quoted him extensively and that allows us to see what area said anyway so areas writes God himself one of the complicated things whenever we're talking about Trinity and the persons of the Trinity is we so often use the word god specifically to relate to the father that people trip up really fast because we're trying to say we're trying to refer to that person particularly but sometimes they just use the word god even though God refers in the Trinity to the whole system and also to the individual persons so God if you

(36:40) say God you could just mean Christ or you could mean the spirit although we almost never do so God himself the father area says as he really is is inexpressible to all he alone has no equal no one's similar and no one of the same Glory this is the this is the real God we call him unbegotten in contrast to him who by nature is begotten so this is the only unbegotten the first Mover The principle cause because we as we all know we call Christ the only begotten son well he's begotten then then the implication in Aries interpretation of what begotten means is that at some point or rather there was a

(37:26) time when Christ hadn't been begotten yet and therefore was not did not exist God by contrast is unbegotten we praise him as without beginning in contrast to him who has a beginning so Christ at some point began we worship him as Timeless Timeless in contrast to him who in time has come to exist he the father is without beginning made the son a beginning of created things father produced him as a son for himself by begetting him he the son has none of the distinct characteristics of God's Own being for he is not equal to nor is he of the same

(38:10) being as the father God the father is wise for he himself is the teacher of wisdom which is the son sufficient proof that God is invisible to all the father is invisible to all God the father is invisible to both things which were made through the son and also to the son himself so as we see all that the father is on begotten the sons begotten the father's Eternal the son came into being the son has a totally different substance an Essence from the father okay so Aries goes on to say I will say specifically how the invisible is seen

(38:54) by the Sun by That Power by which God father is able to see each according to his own measure the son can bear to see the father as is determined so there is a Triad not equal in glories so we have a true not quite not a trinity of equal beings but a Triad not equal in glories their beings are not mixed together amongst themselves there is a Triad of beings there is father son and spirit of the father is infinite and so therefore Beyond far surpassing the other glories as far as their glories one infinitely more glorious than the other

(39:32) the father in his Essence is a foreigner to the son because he exists without beginning understand that the monad the one the God all by himself eternally was but the dyad the two of them together father and son was not before it came into existence it immediately follows that although the sun did not exist the father was still God so God was always God even without the son God doesn't need the son to be God so this is a much more strict monotheism yes we're saying yes the sun's Divine and all these things but so much less than the father

(40:13) hence the Sun not being eternal came into existence by the father's will he is the only begotten God and this is and this one is alien from all others wisdom which is the sun came to be wisdom by the will of the wise God hence he is conceived innumerable aspects so the sun is all of these different hypotheses of God he is Spirit he is power he is wisdom he has God's glory truth God's image God's word the logos so understand that he has also conceived of as Radiance and Light so the sun has lots of Glorious stuff here the one who is superior is able to beget

(40:59) one equal to the Sun but not someone more important or Superior or greater at God's the father's will the son has the greatest the greatness and qualities that he has his existence from when and from whom and from then are all from God so nevertheless as great as this all is the logos here is dependent on God who would be God without all of those things so where does some of these ideas come from well there's a really interesting scriptural precedent for Aries conception and this is the speech of divine wisdom

(41:42) from The Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible and so this is what I'm saying is I was suggesting here that uh Christianity has a you know as a monotheist religion has a lot of complex complex issues here with having the father Jesus and the Holy Spirit but this these same problems of of Eternal ideas exist in Judaism as well this was running around in the Hebrew Bible and so for example in this passage of Proverbs we have a Divine being wisdom who is separate from God even though Judaism is monotheist and so

(42:23) how does that how are that reconciled well um we've seen already we had a lecture on Philo of Alexandria who essentially posits that God you know the in um God the Father the source the invisible God nevertheless has hypotheses that are emanating from God like God's word God's spirit God's logos who in some sense are knowable and seeable when some sense are um still God but are also separate from God and so that already prefigures and influences maybe even a Christian idea of of Trinity and understanding of God and I'm just mention in in Islam you think that they don't have that but

(43:13) actually they do so in Sunni Islam they um a precept for many Muslims and there's all kinds of different understandings of how Islam works is that the Quran itself God spoke in word the Holy scripture of Islam is also uncreated and it is co-eternal with God the Creator so in other words the Quran as it is written in early medieval Arabic that has always existed before all of creation before the universe began and everything and it actually is timeless and eternal just like God well so if so if that's the case according to um

(43:54) uh anyway Greek Theology and philosophy um that means that the Quran is a second hypest a hypothesis of God and that there are in fact two persons of uh do not a dyad not a not a trinity in in Islam but that would be a to God godhead uh if that's the case otherwise because in other words the Quran is eternal if otherwise if for real monotheism you have to have only a monad and the monad creates the Quran so at some point or other the Quran did not has to come into being if if we're it is fully monotheistic without uh two persons within a dyad godhead so

(44:39) I don't think a lot of Muslims to think about that so anyway this is from the Hebrew Bible from the Book of Proverbs this is wisdom speaking a Divine being I wisdom dwell together with Prudence I possess knowledge and discretion I love those who love me and seek and those who seek me find me the Lord brought me forth as the first of his Works before the Deeds of old I was formed long ages ago at the very beginning when the world came to be when there were no watery depth I was given birth when there were no springs

(45:18) overflowing with water before the mountains were settled in place before the hills I was given birth before he made the world or its Fields or any of the Dust of the earth I was there when he set the heavens in place when he marked out the Horizon on the face of the deep when he established the clouds above and fixed securely The Fountains of the deep when he gave the sea its boundary so that the waters would not overstep his command and when he marked out the foundations of the earth I within I was constantly at his side I was filled with delight day after day

(45:54) rejoicing in his presence rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind now then my children listen to me listen to wisdom blessed are those who keep my ways listen to my instruction and be wise do not disregard it so this passage illustrates that even within Judaism monotheism is complicated so the Book of Proverbs portrays wisdom as a Divine being presence with God at the creation and given birth uh by God before the creation and so you can see how that very much fits into the idea so area said that Christ is God's word

(46:38) God's logos but also God's wisdom and so here we understand that Arius is drawing from like a passage like this and it is showing that wisdom is a creation even so even if it's the earliest and most important creation so for Arius wisdom logos is later incarnate as Christ so the Book of Proverbs doesn't have any idea like that but that's going to happen but obviously for a Christian that's how Aries understands it so this is a very important Divine being but as area says still infinitely less than the Creator who is the one uh first cause the true

(47:20) source so Arias also explained his core beliefs to a like-minded bishop in Anatolia what's now turkey a guy named eusebius of nicomodia and he says area says look there's all kinds of different ideas about uh about how Christ works so some of them say the sun is an irritation it's a belch so there's a um I think it's a gnostic version of uh of history that I'm sorry of cosmology that where essentially the universe is produced by belching or even laughing others say that he is a production others say that he is also unbegotten so um

(48:12) so the partisan use of this words here so Arius is saying is essentially saying that begotten means created and obviously the Nicene folks are going to say that there is a very big difference between begotten and made so they say begotten not made Arius is saying if for Jesus to have ever to be Eternal like for Christ to be Eternal like the father we would have to call him unbegotten when we actually do call him begotten so this is his um you know kind of partisan jab here so there's some people who say that he's eternal but he's using a partisan phrase for that so these are impieties to which we

(48:53) cannot listen even though the Heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths so even though um you know in this we're we're showing because Aries is condemned as a heretic by the proto-orthodox and is remembered that way and just get his followers get um wiped out eventually by the main line uh Christianity he nevertheless also has that same conception people who don't believe with him are the Heretics so for him Aryans are the True Believers and it's the proto-orthodox are Heretics along with the gnostics and so forth Heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths but we say and believe and have

(49:31) taught and do teach that the sun is not unbegotten nor in any way part of the unbegotten and that he does not derive his substance from any matter but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted Before Time and before ages as perfect as God only on begotten I'd say only begotten and unchangeable and that before he was begotten or created or purposed or established he was not for he was not unbegotten we are persecuted because we say the son has a beginning but that God is without beginning and so this is really the

(50:14) crucial thing uh for between areas and his Rivals uh the proto-orthodox the other proto-orthodox the people who are going to win out so even though Christ here is existing maybe before time itself you know the rest of creation and is as perfect as God is unchangeable is God's only begotten nevertheless at some point or other Christ had a beginning and so he unlike God did not exist at some point so Arius was a priest in Alexandria Alexandria prior to Christianity even had been the center of the Hellenistic

(50:54) world the center of uh Greek thought after after the Classical period when the the former Cosmopolitan Capital Athens transferred and it became the center of learning even then after the rise of Christianity this continues to be a sophisticated center of learning and a sophisticated Center for Christian theologians um and so uh the bishop at the time who is actually named Alexander and so Alexander of Alexandria Alexander had originally asked Arius to actually look at this question and to do um to think about it and write about it but Alexander was not pleased one bit with

(51:36) the conclusions that Arius reached and So eventually he decided that he had to excommunicate Arius and expel him from the Alexandria Church which was a divisive move so it's not unpopular and popular it's both unpopular and popular because it had torn the church apart so much that a lot of people believed Arius it's a very compelling smart speaker and a lot of people absolutely opposed him so nevertheless even though he got excommunicated Aries continued to have supporters all around the Empire and it caused a lot of internal Church divisions all over the place

(52:16) so Constantine the first Christian emperor part of his hopes in embracing the religion may have been like I say this was an ERA for the Roman Empire of a great spiritual crisis the breakdown of faith in the very localized Pagan cult Traditions that had existed the kind of excitement about um Greco-Roman moral philosophy the excitement about different mystery religions this was a religion that Constantine himself had faith in and thought maybe you know if you had a lot of insight we don't know it was a long

(52:54) way away for this to happen maybe eventually would be a unified Force for his divided Empire and actually ultimately it does become that nevertheless the church that he inherited was itself very divided and so um he him decided that he needed to impose order and Unity on this church that he was inheriting and he did that by doing something that had never been done before he called all of the churches Bishops semi-autonomous Bishops all over together called them all together for what ended up being called an ecumenical council for the in other words Universe

(53:33) this is calling everybody in the whole universe together it's the like the World Series but you know is only teams in the United States this is the whole universe but actually only the Roman Empire that's what they're talking about so the Council of nicaea in 325. and this is where uh Santa Claus slaps areas so Arius attends he presents his views um that we're trying to reach consensus and so um we want to Constantine wanted to have this brought uh so that this could be figured out once and for all um and even though this is a delightful image Saint Nicholas we have a list of all the

(54:14) Bishops that attended St Nicholas is not on that list the story is a couple hundred years later in lies of Saint Nicholas and so forth and so him slapping areas is probably just Legend but you can um Arius does get smacked down at this and so it is uh it does kind of what what actually results is history which is to say he was not a unanimous decision areas had a bunch of supporters but it was by far and away the majority view was anti-aryan view the what becomes the Nicene View um and so areas views are rejected at nicaea like I say while he had some very

(54:52) loyal supporters there the council condemned his chrysology as a heresy and almost all the depictions of nicaea are kind of like this where you see at the center there's the emperor Constantine and he's surrounded by all of the assembled Bishops of the Empire and then what people don't always notice but it's almost always in all of these pictures and icons is there's areas right there kneeling or lying prostrate condemned as a heretic at the feet of the emperor in most pictures of the council this is a much later depiction here medieval depiction and in this case you

(55:32) can see at the bottom where Arius would have been sitting so Constantine is there and the Bishops are all around him and then the bottom it says hereticy ariani damn Nati anyway so they and they're all taking areas as books and they're putting him into a pile and they're lighting them on fire so the emperor Constantine at the conclusion of the council issued a decree against Arius and against aryanism he said if any writing composed by areas should be found should be handed over to the Flames so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated but nothing will be left to

(56:11) even remind anyone of him further he went on to decree that if you find anybody actually secretly hiding an Aryan book if they've got it under you know in their crawl space or under their pillar or something so you're not seeing it and you find them haven't after they've been hiding it that person's going to be executed so um he's pretty serious about uh stamping out heresy this is an emperor who has recently issued the edict of Milan the issue of Toleration so people are allowed to worship as they please throughout the Empire but tolerance is not going to include tolerance for Christian heresy

(56:50) and that's a precedent that's set here right at the very beginning of the Imperial Church so in the next 10 years Arius was forced to recant his views he rewrote his books to obliterate all of the problematic writings the writings that have been declared heresy after he did all that he was restored to communion even though lots of Bishops still opposed him and didn't like him when he's visiting Constantinople the bishop of Constantinople um didn't want him to speak and actually prayed that he wouldn't be able to that God would strike him down and then what

(57:30) ends up happening is he has a sudden malady um kind of explosive internal malady which is very painful and horrible and caused him to die his enemies cited that as divine retribution for his heresy but lots of other people said sir looked like he was poisoned to death so he had a very gruesome death as depicted here nevertheless despite Arius death and the edict Banning his teachings Aryan christology continued to make sense to a large number of Christians for centuries it took another five decades for Roman

(58:11) emperors to stamp out arianism within the bounds of the empire so one of Constantine's successors Justinian it's called Justinian I'm not just um Julian sorry Julian the apostate is he's called um wanted to stop have stop promoting Christianity and stop patronizing it the Imperial government patronizing it and he also ended Imperial persecution of Heretics he said well I can't take the government is no longer going to um we're going to have tolerance for Heretics too so arianism gets a little boost during Julian's short Reign

(58:52) meanwhile a Gothic convert a Germanic convert who went on to become an Aryan Bishop so not part of the the mainline church anymore named ultilas went on to become a very successful missionary to the various Gothic tribes that are living just beyond the Danube Frontier or along the Danube Frontier north and west of Constantinople and so there are all of these Germanic tribes they are actually in some sense um threatening Rome's Frontier borders but sometimes they're employed as mercenaries to protect the Roman

(59:34) Frontier from worse tribes like the Huns that are going to come from the and so forth and so they've had a lot of long contact in her kind of semi-romanized anyway and so one of the things that happens is that olphalus translates the Bible into Gothic and with that wonderful tool he's able to convert most of the Germanic tribes to Christianity but because he's an Aryan he converts them to Aryan Christianity and so now the visigos the ostrogoths the vandals the um the burgundians they are now all going to be Christians but they're all from

(1:00:14) the standpoint of the Romans heretic Christians and that becomes especially painful and ironic when as the Western Empire collapses and the different Germanic mercenary confederations end up carving it up into different kingdoms the swaby kingdom the Vandal Kingdom the visigothic kingdom The Burgundian Kingdom the ostrogothic kingdom these all become Aryan Christian kingdoms where at least the Army and the nobility are all Aryan Christians although the local people the Romans that are being ruled by the Germanic

(1:00:55) nobility they all continue to be Catholic Orthodox and so um anyway so this is the the site the kind of the state of Christendom as of 495. and so for centuries thereafter Germanic Aryans ruled over Catholic Roman subjects in the West and we already saw that at the very beginning I showed this image from the Aryan baptistry built by King theodoric the ostrogoth um and then when the ostrogothic kingdom was wiped out by the East Roman Empire when the byzantines came and reconquered Italy and made Italy a province now of the

(1:01:37) Byzantine Empire Justinian built a new baptistry just down the street and this one now is a Catholic Orthodox baptistry and so that is on the right and in some ways there I would like them to be more different so that we can explain you know exactly why um why the the one on the left is expressing a Jesus who is so much less than God he looks not as Godly right the the Jesus on the right is just as naked but now is more muscular he is looking more like God the father in the sense that he's got a long hair and a beard

(1:02:18) and so forth um it's not as clear though why in the Orthodox one he's so off-center and John the Baptist is just as much in the middle you know which is kind of interesting and strange it's possibly also the fact in the left one the Holy Spirit has some energy that's coming to Jesus and so he's and that would he's not an adoptionist so I'm not sure exactly why so who who do you wonder in both of these cases is this guy with white hair and a white beard and his in his kind of a low slung skirt on and is holding this kind of branch and you can see him on the left

(1:03:00) in the Aryan baptistry and then he's on the right kind of in the background in the Orthodox one the Catholic one who do you suppose that is God the Father no that is the River Jordan personified which is frankly as far as I can see see it myself as a holdover of a pagan image essentially this is the image of you know rivers are where Gods the Tiber is a God and so forth and essentially this is the this is River Jordan and why why River Jordan is pictured even all the way so it just shows how long these

(1:03:35) conceptual and artistic Traditions kind of continue um anyway so it's very interesting so that represents the River Jordan personified okay so the end of the Germanic Aryan Kingdom so as I mentioned the ostrogas ended up getting wiped out by the byzantines and so did the Vandals um the swaby I think mostly got wiped out by the visigos the visigos in Spain ultimately converted to Catholicism so that ended arianism there and the burgundians also converted eventually and in fact actually what ends up happening is with the rise of Islam

(1:04:18) um several of the heartlands of Christianity Syria Egypt North Africa and then even Spain for a time are now become under Muslim Rule and so all of these kind of Aryan areas are wiped out and the the soul Germanic tribe that had converted to being Catholic the Franks end up being the dominant Germanic Kingdom thereafter and so that ends the problem for from the Catholic and Orthodox perspective of arianism as arianism is ultimately Stamped Out all right so I want to go back and look at how how to understand the idea the

(1:05:04) Nicene trinitarian formula um that won out so we've already said you know this formula of how we understand the unknowable unseeable Creator the father the father's word logos the father's wisdom the Savior the Christos the Christ how those are both God but are not what same as each other and also how God's spirit is God but is not the father or the son right so in order to express this complicated idea the Council of nicaea created a Creed and Creed is from the um our word in English Creed is from the Latin word Credo which means I believe

(1:05:53) um we still quote Christians still quote a Creed called the Nicene Creed but that is actually a later development and so um the original Creed that comes out of the Council of nicaea is different and I'm going to read the original one since this is the one that is created to try to create Christian Unity after suppressing arianism and so the original Creed reads We Believe in one God the father so that's going to be one God and now it's gonna we're gonna explain three components of the one God so we believe in one God and that is the

(1:06:32) Father Almighty maker of all things visible and invisible and in one Lord Jesus Christ the son of God begotten of the Father the only begotten that is of the essence of the Father God of God light of light very God of very God begotten not made so so this unbegotten thing is not the same thing is what as far as the Nicene guys are concerned with what Arius is arguing cons substantial with the father so unlike what Aries is saying where there's no substance interplay no intermixing of substances among the

(1:07:14) Father the Son and the whole no they are consubstantial they are the same substance by whom all things were made both in heaven and on Earth so the idea um that wisdom has in the Book of Proverbs that as all creation is being made wisdom is Right There by God's side so in the same way that we understand uh in the Genesis story and God is present and also present and Creator God the source is present and also present is the spirit of God which is resting upon the waters and also present is God's word because God speaks and says let there be light and so as everything God's word in speaking all things are

(1:07:57) created and that word of speaking is Christ who this is more about Christ who who for us men and for our Salvation came down and was incarnate and was made man he suffered and the third day he rose again ascended into heaven from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead and then and so then we started the beginning we believe one God father a son and in the Holy Ghost and and obviously they hadn't thought as much about the Holy Ghost at this point that's all they say we also believe in the Holy Ghost

(1:08:35) um later there's much much of stuff added about the Holy Ghost proceeding from the father and so forth but right at this point they haven't thought about the Holy Ghost say but those who say so in the original Creed here this is not in the later Creed a lot of those things aren't in the later Creed but in the later in the later Nicene Creed all of this anti-aryan stuff they got rid of but they needed to say it at the beginning because they're still trying to suppress arianism but those who say there was a

(1:09:01) time when he was not and he was not before he was made and he was made out of nothing or he is of another substance or Essence or the Son of God is created or changeable or alterable they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic church so all of these kind of Aryan ideas no nope nope nope that is how we all are going to believe as Nicene Christians going forward so although the Trinity is a paradox I want to point out that it's actually based on contemporary philosophical ideas about how Eternal Essences can be

(1:09:46) shared um a lot of times we look at things from history a historical artifact and it looks so strange an alien and wackadoodle but actually almost everything is always can just very be very easy and understandable outgrowth of its immediate context and this is true too from the philosophical context when the Trinity is formulated so Socrates Plato and Aristotle the beginnings of Western philosophy inquired into the essence the essential qualities of various things so they wanted to find out what is virtue what is Justice what is goodness

(1:10:29) what is the essentialness the essence the qualities and so forth of these Eternal Concepts they ultimately are also these Monas who argue that there is a single Source or a first cause of everything so Aristotle created a system of examining four causes of beings and Central to his inquiry is trying to figure out what is their essential purpose what is their purpose and so he looks at it firstly and he says okay what is its material cause which is to say what is the thing made of so if we get a book book is made out of paper and so forth that is the material cause of the book the lowest and first thing then

(1:11:19) what is its form what is its configuration so this is the idea in the mind of its sculptor so um so in other words before we have a thing how do you shape the clay and have the idea of it what is its form that it's going to take the efficient cause how did it happen what external forces acted on the object in order for it to be made so the efficient cause of a baby is its mother so the mother is the agent that causes that there's something that caused the mother to exist and so forth or something the mother could conceive but the immediate

(1:11:59) efficient cause of the baby is the mother and then finally there's the important most important cause the final cause the end which is also it's just to say the purpose what is the thing's motive what is its meaning the pencil's purpose is for writing that's what it's for and that's the most important thing that's the essence ultimately of this uh um the essential quality anyway of this thing the final cause the purpose so therefore substance is really about purpose and it's not really about matter and

(1:12:35) this is very confused in Christianity um a Catholics most Catholics common Catholics are concern are confused about themselves certainly Protestants with anti-catholic rhetoric are very confused but there is an idea in the sacrament of the Eucharist in the Catholic Church they believe that there what happens to the Eucharist when the mass is performed by the priest is something called transubstantiation when the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ and this is almost universally misunderstood

(1:13:12) to be not it's called transubstantiation so the substance has changed and has almost always misunderstood is transmaterialization so they people think oh well that now this substance literally has become flesh and blood when obviously that is not what has happened at all it continues to be materially bred and wine so the substance in this context is not what the material is it is what the purpose is so it's not its literal material form what changes is the bread and the wine now have exactly the same purpose of Christ Christ is also consubstantial it has the

(1:13:58) same purpose as the Holy Spirit and the father so it's all sharing in one substance one purpose not one material and indeed you can't have one material God is immaterial that is not about material things God is eternal as opposed to matter which is transitory and changeable so transubstantiation like I said then is not about the material form of the Eucharist it is about its purpose okay and this is um definitely things that uh that platonists and other philosophers are continuing to um develop at this kind of background at this time and go we've had lots of

(1:14:38) lectures on on platonism and other forms and so that we can have a context but I'll just mention this briefly so Plato argued that immaterial Eternal ideas Plato's theory of the forms that the forms the Eternal Concepts like goodness like virtue those are more real than the perishable matter that we experience in the physical world after all you know every single thing that I all these clothes are going to be ruined be fairly soon from entropy this isn't usually your clothes don't last 50 years and so forth usually you know at some

(1:15:18) point or rather everything that you see will be very different and gone everything in the material world has a life cycle but goodness Justice that is eternal that is always going to be present just like mathematical Concepts as far as Plato is concerned so later neoplatenness elaborated on how these different internal uh sources the Eternal Source the one source and also the different various Eternal forms how are they interconnected how are they understood and they came up with this idea that they were hypotheses or a hypostasis they were in a hypostatic union with one

(1:16:03) another and so for example a really influential neoplatonist platinus who himself was ironically very anti-christian but nevertheless had all of his ideas hijacked and stolen by Christianity and put into Christian theology so platinus created a cosmology that had essentially Three core hypotheses hypotheses and so one of these is the one one of these then is the Divine intellect and one of these is the world world soul so the Divine animal intellect is an emanation of the one and the world soul is an emanation of the Divine intellect and then the sensible world the physical world this material world that is not in

(1:16:56) hypostatic Union with the three but it is just is lower and material the world that we can touch and see and taste and so forth that is an emanation of the world soul and then we can connect with the spiritual higher spiritual realities through Transcendence so even though we are existing on the sensible world we can transcend to the world soul and so forth and so this is kind of the spiritual cosmology of contemporary Greek philosophers like neoplatonists and so forth um this is you can see how that's this could be very similar to the Trinity where you have three beings including

(1:17:40) the the one the source that are all in hypostatic Union with each other um it's going to hear an emanation so we have the sun is the logos God's word is begotten from The Source from the father and the spirit proceeds so emanate emanate and so forth so you can see how that would also be a comparable idea So within this with this in mind really the Trinity is not so alien from its contemporary ancient philosophers got one God consisting of three persons in a union that is hypostatic which is to say sharing the same purpose and substance

(1:18:18) which is also spiritual and immaterial not Material so in contrast to what Arius is saying that Nicene thinkers are saying begotten is not something that happened at some point in the past and is done so it wasn't that there was no sun and then God begot a son and now he has a son and so there therefore the sun is begotten rather everything God Is Timeless and everything to God is continually happening now so so therefore what that means is Christ is being begotten now Christ is always being begotten Christ was never not being begotten being begotten this is something that is continually

(1:19:07) happening in an eternal now and an eternal presence as is the spirit proceeding from God it is not something that at some point or other there was no God and and by the way the Nicene um folks point out that because God the source the one is unchangeable there can't have been a time when Christ the son is begotten because that would mean that the unchangeable unknowable God had to change because if there was a time before God had uh a son and there was a time when God was not a father and so for the father God the Father to be

(1:19:53) unchangeable and eternal and so forth it also means that has to be timeless and it can't be there can't have been some time before there's a sun so um so that's a counter logical argument against arianism that the Nicene folks made so how do we understand this today um so my denomination Community of Christ upholds the trinity as does almost all Christian denominations is only a very tiny number of churches like the Jehovah's Witnesses like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint the Mormon church

(1:20:34) some of the other Adventists some there's a small number of newer churches that are that are non-trinitarian um the Jehovah's Witnesses I think are sort of sort of Aryan again because they have a one God and Jesus is a lesser Divine being still God but not really like arianism and uh in terms of the Mormon Church the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints Rejects having a one God there is no infinite omnipotent God because the father is simply also a progressing being who was once a human and is therefore limited so it's essentially polytheism uh even though neither of those churches

(1:21:15) Define that that way in the same way that when I was talking about Muslims having um the Quran and hypostatic Union with God and therefore they have a dyad they also don't say that but I'm just saying that would be the logical conclusion of this based on this theology so the Trinity like I say is an idea that developed in its historical context the historical Jesus was not a trinitarian by any means at all and frankly none of his first Christian followers people like Paul and so on they hadn't formulated this idea of the

(1:21:49) of the Trinity this is something that people came up with as they tried to understand how they wanted to understand that and so what for me um Trinity is understood best understood as a prism through which Christians have traditionally experienced the divine and that doesn't mean this is the only way to experience the Divine or that God literally exists this way this is not literal at all this is immaterial this is spiritual and this is conceptual and paradoxical so how do we understand it well we are

(1:22:30) now unlike ancient medieval and early modern Christians we are now living in an era that is after the invention of the academic disciplines of history and Archeology and literary criticism and centuries now of study have shown that there are very wide differences between the biblical portraits of Jesus and the his the biblical Jesus and the historical jesuses as I'm saying here and obviously not to mention the theological Christ an idea that is still developing you know at the time the historical Jesus is alive I'm saying developing because

(1:23:09) holy wisdom as an idea is already there in Proverbs God's logos as a hypothesis of of God God's image God's word is already there in Philo of Alexandria before before Christianity so how do how do we understand the relationship now between the historical Jesus of Nazareth now that we have access to him through the discipline of History something that early Christians after um the last Christian who knew Jesus in person died they no longer had any access to historical Jesus how do we understand the relationship of

(1:23:47) the historical Jesus to the Divine man that is portrayed as Jesus Christ in the multiple competing and contradictory portraits that we have in the canonical scriptures and the extra canonical scriptures and again how do we Define that that in relationship to the Christ of theology God's wisdom God's logos God's image God's glory Etc so like I've said before Christians reading gospel accounts in the Bible today even frequently assume that they're effectively reading a biography or history of things that happen that they're encountering the historical Jesus that is absolutely not

(1:24:25) true it comes from a total misunderstanding of what Biblical texts are where they came from what they're for and when you're reading the gospels what you're actually doing is encountering the Jesus Christ of scripture which differ for each evangelist even when there's an awareness of the gospels or not history books some Christians still assume that evangelists Mark Matthew Luke and John that were disciples basing their accounts directly on the historical Jesus and that as we've seen again and again is not the

(1:24:57) case rather all four gospels are Anonymous none of them was written by an eyewitness of the historical Jesus rather the gospels were written by Christians who had already believed come to believe in the Risen Christ and it's based on testimonies and they come to believe that because of the testimonies of disciples who had had visions of the Risen Jesus so people had visions of the Risen Jesus that gave them testimonies that Jesus the Risen Jesus is the Christ in other words the logos the Divine wisdom this hypothesis of the the Father the UN the

(1:25:40) seeable image of God of the unseeable god and so forth so they based on that understanding and they they wrote their gospels and whereas there are some memories of the historical Jesus preserved in those texts much more important as a source is in fact the stories of the Hebrew Bible and so actually the major source is the Bible as opposed to occasional memories of the historical Jesus that have made their way into the tax so thus if we just think of it as a development the historical Jesus inspired Visions which converted people to Christianity

(1:26:21) those Christians then wrote scriptures that inspired the idea of Trinity so the this view of the Divine in my view then as it developed is paradoxical it's a mystery by definition and it shouldn't be literally or a limitation on on how God is understood or viewed um oh I already used that slide and so the historical Jesus in my view in my own not 21st century christology the historical Jesus didn't perform the supernatural acts that are described in the gospels so those kinds of stories are entirely literary they're keeping with ancient misunderstandings of physical causation they're identical to

(1:27:07) um any number of ancient books where ancients understood Supernatural things to be able to happen magic and so forth and that continued on all the way through the Middle Ages and so these are not different or unique or in any sense and in fact we have all kinds of of accounts that are better in terms of being actual Witnesses and so forth than the than the gospel accounts rather so the historical Jesus we get out through history we shouldn't and it's not the same as the Christ of scripture the sacred

(1:27:39) stories of scripture in the Gospels my opinion should be read by Christians for their theological and their Transcendent messages not because you want it to be history and not because um you were excited about the idea that physical magic actually happens in in the world or something like that that will misinform your world view and it will also cause you to miss the actual Transcendent message philosophical the ethical all the other kinds of messages and finally the expansive idea of Christ is not simply a story of a historical figure but it's a part of the way Christians

(1:28:23) understand and experience the Divine in the world and so this idea is that yes Monas have always felt that there's one source it's unseeable unknowable it's so distant we cannot relate to the one but Jews and also Greek philosophers and others theorize that wait we can experience emanations from that Source God's word God's glory truth goodness virtue and so forth and that these are a bridge between this unknowable source and the human world or in the case of the definition of Christ fully human fully Divine in other words a thing that is contr is uh is

(1:29:07) conceptually Bridging the Gap between the unknowable and our own a noble and eternal immaterial spiritual and our own material mortal present and so forth and so that is my thoughts on arianism versus the trinity I have a little drink of water here um I want to thank you for supporting the channel Brad Stewart thank you uh for your donation Filippo uh denodo thank you for your support you also are suggesting some lectures so for example a lecture on proto-indo-european stuff swastikas and other symbols found in

(1:30:00) multiple culture common Gods connections I love that stuff so yeah those kind of things are where we can see um overlap those are good ideas I like that Daryl Scott thank you for your support of the channel Dan Howard thank you for your donation appreciate it um Nicholas surges says Nicholas came to a lecture here in person once right he asked can arianism be seen as an attempt to reconcile the new Christian belief system with the polytheism of previous religions that's interesting yeah um so possibly I would say um I think that

(1:30:40) uh I think that actually monotheists have had like the abrahamic religion so Christianity uh Judaism and Islam have made like a really big deal um about their monotheism as if it's really really different from paganism and polytheism so I think that it's not generally as big a deal in terms of the difference as long as your tradition is is monist so in other words if there's simply One Source it doesn't you know it that's kind of the more important thing so as opposed to dualism where where you have two competing poll sources good and versus evil or something like that so so a monist

(1:31:27) universe where there's one source it doesn't really matter if you have like the one God the one source and then you have let's say like the Hindus you know three million other gods that are sort of emanations from that Source you still have kind of a A monus system that is about the same as opposed to like I say so Judaism there's still angels and so what's an angel an angel is in some sense a little G God right so it's a Divine being that is not um not mortal not human and so forth and so and so in some ways um there's a bunch of

(1:32:07) you know there's a mono there's been a long a monotheist bigotry against um polytheists you know all the way back to the beginning uh including polemical stories about Idols which are also uh false so people don't believe the Idols are Gods the way they um exist in anti-idol stories rather they believe that there is a Divine force and the Divine the idol has some kind of sacral connection you know the to the the image has some sacral connection to that God it's not the god themselves you can't carve and created God so so it could be um but I I'm not sure I think that uh

(1:32:48) I think it's a attempt to um to fix the logical contradiction at the heart of trinitarianism people are uncomfortable with something that on the first line of math um create something that is a a false statement in math and and is therefore doesn't seem that could be true um why did Nicholas also asked why did arianism pose such a threat to Mainline Christianity um it's I don't so I'm so it's a it's it's definitely cause a Division I don't know that it caused a huge threats the the um it was ended up being a minority position and the um you know once the emperor got

(1:33:36) involved it got crushed pretty fast so it took about 50 years um it's kind of a Quirk a history happenstance that um that the German Germans the Goths and so on got converted by an Aryan and that therefore it had the second life um yes why was it more popular with the Germanic subjects of the Roman Empire it was more popular because um you know this ophelus translated uh the Bible into Gothic and he and so therefore they they were able these illiterate Germanic peoples you know they didn't have to try to learn Latin and Greek in order to understand Christianity they got it preached in their own language and then it was

(1:34:19) preached by the guy who translated was an Aryan so he taught them all to be Aryans and so it continued to be popular with the um with the Germanic military leaders of the kingdoms in the west Roman Empire as a kind of a way to um for people who had been let's say socially lower and technologically and culturally lower so the German barbarians conquer um the Roman States but more or less keep everything act up intact and yet hear people so they have a military and a warp like capacity but once you start moving into the Palaces you also start losing that kind of a thing and you just become sort of

(1:35:03) um let's say you are maybe feeling culturally inferior because you are sort of bumpkins that you understood that the people you've conquered had a Higher Culture than you or something like that and so but you could you could hold hold it out and say well but you guys are all Heretics you're all dumb we know how Christ really is we're we have the truth of that and so I think that there was that sense among the Germanic Aryans that they wanted to keep that and they did keep it up into for a long time as a way to hold something over their subjects that

(1:35:41) they had a little bit of inferiority complex about um uh zellini sock says um um that my explanation doesn't entirely agree with my explanation of partialism so um so Jesus is a hundred percent God but not a hundred percent of God that's a coherent way to phrase the Orthodox view it's not partialism under the latin trinitarian model also partialism is only a heresy in Catholicism since the late Middle Ages Eastern councils don't condemn it and Protestants are not bound by latter and councils okay so so

(1:36:20) so yeah I'm probably I'm very Latin in my Outlook as opposed to Greek so okay I appreciate that um that we can see that the partialism therefore is not the problem so I appreciate you pointing that out that that definition it wouldn't be a problem in Orthodoxy and I agree with you it's not Protestants aren't Bound by this stuff uh and so I'm technically not either you know since we're we're a restoration tradition Church thank you um normative says why did early Christians think it was important to have the correct view on these questions

(1:36:57) Jesus as depicted in the gospels doesn't came too concerned with that yeah well well normative for one thing um so Christianity developed in the first place before um we had how Jesus is depicted in the gospels and so um and so remember that the gospels are later um uh iteration there's already Christians Christianity exists before the gospels are made but that said like you say um Jesus isn't concerned about these things at all but nevertheless um it's a modern uh Protestant especially thing to be especially concerned with what Jesus is doing in the gospels because Protestants are uh take are so

(1:37:45) focused on the biblical text and thinks that's what Christianity is but that is a modern Protestant idea and so um so having an understanding of how the cosmos Works how um the truth about God and the universe and so forth that was pretty important and that was a major contemporary thing that is going on not just within Christianity but it is what all of the philosophers the Greco-Roman philosophers the different schools the stoics the epicureans the uh the cynics and and so forth the platonists are all kind of

(1:38:24) wondering about so so it is a a central concern and um like you say it's not a concern as much though of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels but that is also not the central concern of uh early Christians um so uh okay okay so the name here is videos for stuff I'm confused because I thought you were talking about videos for stuff so there's a guy named videos for Stuff um in the Orthodox uh probably mostly enlisted in the Orthodox version of the Trinity how can the relationship between God and Jesus be thought of as an actual father-son relationship that never made sense to me

(1:39:12) um yeah well so it shouldn't be understood as a literal relationship because this is not um anything about the Trinity is not literal and so it's a um it's an analogy kind of situation and so we have to the Divine realm is totally different and alien from the Mortal and the human realm and so everything is understood by analogy so the you know the holy spirit is not a dove the we we have this understanding that um so conceptually for God and Christ the more theological conception of that is that we have we shouldn't be saying God we should be saying father right because

(1:40:01) since Christ is God too so um that the source the unseeable unknowable invisible source that Christ is the wisdom the word the image the logos the glory and everything else like that and hypostatic Union of that and so in that sense the source is always has an image attached to it so uh and and in that sense it's an analogous situation to be saying parent and Son Heavenly parent and Heavenly son it is not though a um literal relationship or an actual father-son relationship um Winston barquez says why do the synoptics have a low christology

(1:40:51) is it because they took the Divinity of Christ for granted rather than stressed on the historical Jesus with subtle Illusions for his divinity so yeah it could be a little bit like that and so um so we can't always know but essentially the every text we have to kind of be understood we have to get into the feeling of the author the author needs to be writing for an audience and so um those communities the market Community the Lucan Community the Matthew and Community um they are potentially um maybe reacting especially the marketing Community which is really emphasizing and that's the source kind of this very

(1:41:32) uh grittily human Jesus is maybe reacting against um Christian groups that have been arguing for a much higher christology so it may be maybe the author of Mark has heard a lot of people a lot of other Christians who are kind of really emphasizing a a fully spiritual or a fully Divine Jesus that really wasn't very human and so this writing the story this way is saying no he was he was a human he was fully human and so it also um the whole thing is a theological argument and so that community may be also writing in reaction to things that they've heard or

(1:42:11) they understand that as their as their tradition so yeah I think that that's an interesting question and that could well be that so in other words they um that that's how they're seeing it sometimes people think well it's the the synoptics because they're closer to the historical Jesus have a lower christology naturally but really what's so interesting with Christianity is with our first writer Paul Paul it's kind of a high christology and so um so high christology emerges really fast uh in in the tradition and so and so in some sense the gospel writers can

(1:42:47) be reacting back to a high christology that's already existing to create a low christology and reaction uh Raymond Ortiz says uh did Joseph Smith believe in the Trinity at first but change in the course I believe uh in a sort of try Unity of three gods uh The Book of Mormon does mention that the father-son and holy spirit are one God so yes Ray so in the beginning so the Trinity is very hard for regular people to understand uh Joseph Smith is a um a smart person but is not a highly educated Theologian and so he is confused by this paradoxical view of the

(1:43:28) Trinity like everybody gets often and so in dictating The Book of Mormon The Book of Mormon is actually not trinitarian it is modalist so the Book of Mormon talks about God and it will say uh Jesus will be speaking and Jesus will say uh you know G I am the father so essentially um that's not that's not allowed in trinitarianism so it'll say the it's not it's not just um God in the thought the father and the son are one in purpose that's how um the later conception of it in Mormonism or formulation of it in the original Book of Mormon it is uh the son is the

(1:44:12) Father the Son is the Eternal Father well that is not that's so that's anti-trinitarian that's not allowed that's modalism so in other words the sun is just a mode of the father they're all one being so then like you say at the end of his um Ministry uh Joseph Smith rejects monotheism and asserts that there is that both um Jesus and God are not are not the same substance they're not the same God they are different gods and God is himself not God because God is merely a man who has progressed to the state where he's at so he's therefore not infinite Eternal omnipotent omnipotent The Source the one source and everything

(1:44:51) like that simply a God so it is a rejection of um exaltation theology that is the um the doctrine of the Utah Mormon church is a rejection of monotheism so we reject that so Nicholas surges says would it be curious to know the source of that image subtitled a medieval depiction including Bernie burning of Aries writings yeah I should have I I'd have to look it up so yeah we'll I could find it maybe for the comments it's um it was definitely Western because it was written in Latin I could read the Latin

(1:45:29) out of it and so I'm thinking it's um like it was like 11th or 12th century maybe so we'll have to find it uh Nathan Gale writes did Muslim conquerors have differing attitudes regarding Aryans versus uh Orthodox Catholics uh they they actually even though I showed the Muslim map there as kind of wiping everybody out the Muslims got there after after the Aryans had gotten wiped out so so that I don't think they did they would have they would have had no different attitudes so they would have tolerated both types of Christians so you wouldn't be um

(1:46:12) they don't they wouldn't have uh they wouldn't have persecuted one Christians or the other it would allow both uh both types to live but in fact the places they conquered um Tunisia so for example which had been the heart of the Vandal Kingdom the byzantines had already destroyed that and same thing um the Visigoths once they got to Spain the visigos had given up they had by the time that um by the time uh the Muslims got there and destroyed the visigothic kingdom the visigos had already become Orthodox Catholics so so even though I showed that kind of those kingdoms all got

(1:46:51) wiped out they actually arianism got wiped out a little bit before the Muslims got there um Andre Moray says concerning the River Jordan personified how much arianism do you think is still here without people noticing could uh I mention other surviving heresies so I think that I think modern days Christians have all become Aryans again I think that absolutely um when Christians talk about God I think that they only mean God the Father they only mean the source they don't and I think that they do not think of Jesus as

(1:47:28) God so I think that even if you're a Christian who literally thinks all of the different water into wine those kind of things are all happening Jesus is walking on water and stuff like that that is still um a limited I think the Christian conception of that in modern times is this is small potato stuff and that is a limited kind of divine being who is much lower than God uh which and so I think um lots of Christians are have effectively become Aryans even without um even while still saying the the Nicene Creed in a lot of cases

(1:48:06) um and I think for example this is why um why liberation theology has gotten exciting and why the Mormons came up with exultation theology because when you don't think of Jesus as fully human and fully Divine as an actual God as actual God and as a bridge now you suddenly want again the Unseen unknowable God to feel for you a little more you want to have a personal relationship with God that is on that no one has seen and can see and so like with Liberation theology you want a God that weeps with you or with Mormon

(1:48:41) exultation theology you want a God who was once a human being who went through all the things you went through in in normal Christianity you don't need that we already got that in in Christ in other words Christ suffered all those things you know fully human fully Divine we already have this is already something you don't need to add that for in in Liberation theology the um The Liberation part is great I'm I'm just complaining about the theology part of that um we have two related questions so Darth Rama says um

(1:49:10) do you think if Arius had won the day wouldn't Constantine put the full power of the Roman Empire behind his you yes I definitely think that so I don't think that Constantine cared one way or the other about this he is not a major theological thinker Constantine wants unity and so if Arius had been able to argue this then that would be that would have been the way we would have gone and that would be what Christianity the mainline Christianity would be and the Nicene view as we call it as I've been calling it The athenation View would have been Stamped Out

(1:49:42) Miguel Angela says as a personal opinion of course do you think arianism could have survived as a world religion in what ways would have Christianity have saved yeah I think that it could just as easily have been the formulation if that had made become the the world religion I mean that had become the state religion of the Roman Empire and the state's backed thing um sure how different it would be um people barely understand the Trinity as it is even though that's the um even though that is what the the Creed is and the belief is and it seems to me that

(1:50:22) I mean arianism is a little more understandable maybe and uh and so people have been less confused by it in a sense um but it's I mean in a way it is it is like um having more acknowledging layers of hierarchy in the divine right because we have now Divine being who which is definitely less than the one other Divine being so we are getting you know into a place that is I guess more conceptually like um Hinduism or or Greco-Roman paganism and so forth so it would I'm not sure how it would if it was it doesn't necessarily have changed that much I think it would have continued the same way

(1:51:08) um Lisa uh rugerello says do you believe in one godhead so I guess there's a personal belief so what what um so so godhead is a is a synonym or so what does godhead mean you have to define the word godhead and so so godhead is a um an English synonym for essentially saying the Trinity saying um you know the the Father the Son and the spirit and so uh in that sense yes I believe in one godhead but not uh literally right so I believe that there is a source and the prism through which we understand that as Christians traditionally is through the Trinity or godhead but that doesn't mean that uh I

(1:51:59) limit uh God to that because God could be understand understood in all kinds of other different ways um through it by people both on this planet and throughout the cosmos and so forth Jason Smith oh thank you so much for your contribution we really appreciate your support um normative says in probably in response to something I said that logic seems to imply there can't have been a temporal creation to the world since it would require God to change into the creator of the world yeah yeah no no I know saying so if God

(1:52:34) God had a son yes so um so that's a good one so so that would be a good counter argument what I was saying about the father thing that's that would be a nice scene argument and so that is a good counter argument to The Logical argument I've made so um yeah because because there has to be so you could say God eternally is always a Creator so and is perpetually creating but the problem with that making that statement now is then that would imply that creation is eternal and Creation in the Nicene formulation is not so so probably then what we'd what you

(1:53:18) will have encountered uh here is another logical contradiction to the theological proposal so um Michelangelo says um did ophelas make a point of teaching that Christ was less than God or was it implicit and unconscious did the Goths actually care about the difference so yes he did make a point of teaching aryanism um the Goss did care about the difference they were very happy that they had their own you know they had their own way of understanding it they generally didn't persecute their Catholic subjects although they did

(1:53:57) sometimes and uh but they kind of used it as a way to escape um hierarchy right and so one of the things that could have happened certainly happened like with the Franks uh is that when you conquer the Roman Empire and has this giant local Catholic Roman um populists including Church hierarchy that continues to exist even after the military gets replaced and the Civic government gets replaced then you're under the control in some way of that uh that Catholic Roman Church hierarchy that exists whereas the the visigos the

(1:54:36) ostragos the burgundians the vandals they didn't have to worry about that because they had their own Vandal Gothic Bishops and so forth the the local Romans were Heretics as far as they were concerned so they cared about it says did I hear correctly um was there a rebirth of arianism in Western Europe in the Middle Ages and what happened to that um I don't think so we had the um there's a rebirth of of manichaeism essentially in the form of of the cathars and so which is to say it's kind of a spiritual dualism and so

(1:55:12) that's maybe what you're thinking about that I don't know that there's um a rebirth of aryanism you'd have to tell me what you're thinking of um Mike Rogers are the Jehovah's Witnesses and heritors of arianism so it's a um it was a Neo load I mean it's a neo-aryanism so so essentially this idea that um that Christ is still God but this is I'm sorry Christ is still a God Like Divine and less that and not of the same substance from The Source God the father that is a an idea that you can come up with independently so I don't think that the Jehovah's Witnesses

(1:55:55) um red areas or or we're thinking about it in that way but it's just a kind of a conception that you can come on you're on your own and so and so I would say it's kind of a neo-aryan idea I don't know Jehovah's Witnesses enough to to say that definitively but that's what I've understood it to be um so oh narrative so normative oh thank you so much for your support um wasn't and does this normative also asking or not oh arianism today asks wasn't eusebius of caesarea condemned with areas so yes there were multiple other I think you see this Israel and um

(1:56:40) the guy who was saying from Nike media so in other words there's multiple other Aryans that were also condemned so it was not only Aries that was condemned at the time of that of the conference I just kind of simplified the story a little bit you're right there's more than one Bishop that got who had that those kind of teachings were also condemned Tyson says do you think Peter and Paul would have been more supportive of the doctrine of arianism or the trinity um so it's very hard to know what Peter

(1:57:12) would think because we don't have any um any writings that are actually from Peter Peter obviously had very direct relationship with the historical Jesus I don't think I don't really think that Peter would have been particularly comfortable with aryanism or um uh the Trinity probably Peter might have um Peter probably would have been an adoptionist and so he would have thought that he'd had this wonderful Prophet that he'd had this experience with and that at his death or resurrection that that Prophet had been begotten uh by God

(1:57:59) as a as Divine and so therefore it was adopted by God so I think the adoptionism was probably one of the more common understandings of it in early Christianity and so that's what I would speculate Peter would be that's speculative because we don't have any writings of Peter I'm just anticipating maybe what based on what was in the ground bags and and Peter's own experience what he might have been comfortable with uh uh with Paul um yeah it may be I mean again this hasn't been formulated um I guess I would have to look precisely at what Paul is exactly saying for his

(1:58:33) formulation but it would be definitely this an idea that that Christ is um so Christ is Lord Christ is the logos so it is um so it could be interpreted either Aryan or trinitarian but maybe it's probably Paul maybe would have been closer still to Aryan yet but it's not formulated yet so uh there's two related questions um Rayne Weber asks as opposed to the father and the son the holy spirit is barely mentioned in the bible at what point was this holy breath raised in importance and equal to God what you

(1:59:15) could even see here reign in the Nicene Creed there was all of this stuff about what Christ is and all of this it went on and on and on and yet and yet at the original asyncrated just said and the Holy Ghost that's so they've just said that we also believe in the Holy Ghost it's almost just along for the ride and so there is um there is a there's biblical precedence for for having this God's spirit I mentioned at several places like this the um creation story where the Creator is present at the beginning and uh and the spirit of God is there the holy spirit

(1:59:50) is on the on the surface of the water and then God it's word is present when God speaks another example for Christians is the three angels that are visiting Abraham and Sarah that you're understood to be the three persons of the Trinity another one is the baptism of Jesus where the Unseen Creator is there as a voice from the heaven the spirit is descending on Jesus in the form of a dove and and that Christ is of course there at the baptism and there is a lot of talk in that Jesus has about the gift of the spirit that the spirit

(2:00:28) will be present with among us and so forth so the spirit is there the whole time but understanding of the spirit is um it's like you say it's much less people are much less focused on it and they are much less worried about it and ultimately in terms of the formulation of hypotheses and and and uh constant constantial constantial yeah consubstantialism so there was all of these crazy um uh complex complex ways of understanding the persons of God the holy spirit is pretty much along for the right and so people aren't as worried about it and once they've got a way of

(2:01:08) understanding Christ and The Source together then they can also throw the holy spirit in like I say for the ride Leia Delano says I don't understand what the holy spirit is so the image is a dove is it related to our soul I'm sorry to ask such a basic question Lele no don't be sorry this was specifically that we're gonna have to do a lecture when trying to figure out the holy spirit this is specifically a christological um lecture and that's why we I haven't focused on it there's a lot of different ways to understand God's spirit um so a lot of ways that it's understood

(2:01:44) for example is as a source of inspiration a source of comfort um formulation that I always like it that is Saint Augustine taught that at a certain moment you've been studying and you can't understand anything no matter how much you you've read all of these books and listened to all these lectures on quantum physics it doesn't make any sense and then suddenly either of an epiphany it all breaks forth and together and you feel like you get it and you really understand it and you're just filled with that sense of uh calm and wow and awe and and so forth

(2:02:22) that moment of epiphany is what what Saint Augustine calls the holy spirit so what does that all mean so it's it's we'd have to have a whole lecture about it but no yeah I appreciate that we haven't gone into it it's very complicated so thank you so much for all of these questions and great uh comments and also your support we really appreciate it um like I said it won't be election next week but two weeks from now uh be sure to join us when we look at all of those mystery religions