God15
From the perspective of the conflict theorist, Christian16 history is one of hundreds of disputes over scripture, doctrine, and authority. Does God exist and how do we know? How many gods are there? What are the nature and attributes of God: should we be polytheists, dualists, henotheists, monotheists, agnostics, or atheists? How does God relate to Man and how must Man relate to God? How should we relate to people with different beliefs?
By the late second century AD, there were many conflicting forms of Christianity.
The question of authority was unsettled, with Christian communities organized in vastly different ways. Prelates of major Christian communities—primarily Alexandria, Antioch, Cairo, Constantinople, and Rome—struggled for primacy. The Bible did not exist as we know it until the end of the fourth century AD, the 27 books of the New Testament ultimately selected from nearly 70 candidates, including sixteen gospels in addition to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, six books of acts of the apostles, thirteen books of epistles, and nine apocalyptic books. Ad hominem attacks, forgeries, fabrications, and polemics flew back and forth along with learned argument (Ehrman 2003).The first general council of the Church met at Nicea in 325 AD, presided over by the Emperor Constantine, not yet officially a convert. The main question was the relationship among God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. The presbyter Arius admitted that a Holy Spirit became incarnate in Jesus but insisted that it was a new, separately created being of a wholly different nature. To Bishop Athanasius this denied Christianity as a mystic religion of salvation. With some imagination, we can picture the bishops exercising their rhetorical skills and applying Greek logic to sacred texts in defense of esoteric positions. We even can picture the ancient equivalent of smoke-filled backrooms in which some Cappadocian theologians mediated the dispute.
They eventually worked out a compromise that invented the Trinity to explain the relationship. It became the Nicene Creed, named after the location of the council. The Trinity was one substance of three persons. Most accepted the innovative but now orthodox formula.Settling one controversy merely opened another. Doecetics, Ebionites, Marcionites, Monophysites, Nestorians, and Proto-orthodox contended between and among themselves as to whether and how Jesus combined the human and the divine. The Alexandrian theologians insisted that a single divine nature was required for salvation. Those of Constantinople, partly inspired by rivalry for precedence, insisted on Christ’s human nature to emphasize the ethical challenges faced by humans. In much the same way as at Nicea, the bishops meeting at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 reached a compromise formula: “Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity, God truly and man truly. [He is] of one substance with the Father in his deity and of one substance with us in his humanity. [We] acknowledge two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person” (Thompson & Johnson 1937). This formula became orthodox East and West.
As in the previous and in most subsequent cases, some refused compromise. In this case some adhered to the Alexandrian position and formed the Monophysite (mono = one, physite = being or nature) sect, while some chose the Nestorian (after Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople) sect. The people of the eastern empire remained much interested in theology, Gregory of Nyssa noting that you could hardly buy bread, change money, or go to the baths without getting into a theological discussion with a tradesman or even a slave.
Disputes in the declining western portion of the empire tended to be less metaphysical and more legalistic.
Characteristic was the question of whether sacraments conducted by immoral priests were valid. The Donatists insisted they were not. Others including Augustine insisted that the character of the priest had nothing to do with the efficacy of the sacrament. The controversy echoes today whenever reformers are chided for being less than perfect or acting for practical rather than “pure” motives. Augustine won the battle but not the war, which ultimately would give birth to Protestantism. The conflict resumed late in the twelfth century when laymen followers of Waldo took vows of poverty and inveighed against the immoral and worldly character of the clergy. At the Third Lateran Council, Waldo obtained approval from the pope of their vow of poverty and permission to preach, provided they first got the consent of each local ecclesiastical authority. These Waldensians largely ignored the requirement and were condemned at the Council of Verona in 1184, along with the Albigensians (or Cathars).The Albigensians appeared early in the eleventh century and dominated southwestern France from castles such as Montsegur and Puylaurens whose ruins are tourist attractions today. Their heresy turned on the problem of explaining how or why evil, pain, and suffering—in short, an imperfect world—could exist if the Creator was all-knowing and all-good. The orthodox explanation was a falling away from divine grace, as Satan, originally an angel, had done through pride, ambition, and disobedience. The Albigensian posited the existence of an Evil God who would ultimately be defeated, but until then Evil would preside over the world of matter. This dualism originated with Zoroaster (Chapter 6), came west via the Manicheans in Iraq and the Bogomils in the Balkans, and was declared heretical in the twelfth century. When Innocent III’s efforts at conversion failed, he ordered a crusade in 120917 to stamp out the Albigensians. The resulting Treaty of Paris (1229) destroyed the independence of the southern princes.
The Church initiated the Inquisition in 1233 to root out the surviving heretics and backed it with a second crusade, led by Louis IX. The Albigensians slowly dwindled, finally disappearing in the fifteenth century.These few examples from among the many theological conflicts illustrate that the primary methods of the Church for dealing with theological conflict have been the authority of the bishops (later the pope) and debate in council. Participants often worked behind the scenes to find compromise formulas. A majority usually accepted the result but a few diehards often refused to go along, leading to schism. For a brief period, the Church relied on force in the form of crusades and the Inquisition. The abstract and obscure theological arguments of the medieval scholastics no longer interest an increasingly secular world, but have their echoes in recent conflicts over the ordination of women, pedophile priests, gay marriage, and ethical questions raised by scientific advances such as the use of stem cells.