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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: God's gender
Message-ID: <1559@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Dec-83 14:24:24 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1559
Posted: Thu Dec 15 14:24:24 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Dec-83 15:22:30 EST
References: <676@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 76

Reply to Dave Norris:

	Your statement only leaves me confused (which, I admit, is not
	that difficult to do).  Are you separating "Jesus" from
	"Christ"?  Do you believe in the existance of one, both, or
	niether?

Ahem, David, the decision of the council of chalcedon was that Jesus
Christ was one person with 2 natures, both human and divine. This is
called a mystery which is a good way of saying "your guess is as good
as mine" as to what that really means. The problem with the 3 councils
was that they were formed to combat heresy, rather than say something
useful, per se'. However, you later have to refer to "the human nature"
or "the divine nature". The tradition was to use "Jesus" when you talk
about the man and either "Christ" or "the Logos" when you talk about
the divinity.


	I did present the idea that Christian marriage is a mirror of
	the relationship between Christ and the church.  I also stated
	that Jesus himself came to earth as a man.

Did you know that you are verging on heresy here? In the 6th century,
such sentiments could have got you poisoned. You are not supposed to
say that "Jesus came to earth as a man", but rather that the Logos was
incarnated into the man Jesus.  What you said seems to deny the
divinity of the 2nd person, hence the poisoning.

	Are you then admitting that a *man* called Jesus Christ
	existed?

He'd better not be. That one is sure to get you poisoned. (sorry to go
so heavily into the poisoning, but I just wrote a term paper on the
subject.) If you are talking about "Jesus Christ" you can't talk about
the *man* -- this is the "1 person, 2 natures spiritual reality". You
can talk about the man Jesus who was referred to as the Christ, (though
he wasn't, given that the people he was associating spoke Aramaic and
Christ is a translation).

	Steve's (valid) argument is why God created Jesus as a man.

Then Steve has had it. If you think that God created Jesus as a man
then the council of Nicea was for you, to combat your heresy, and it is
a good thing that Christians don't for the most part go about executing
heretics, because that belief would get you executed.

The council of Nicea came up with the Nicean creed which has the
lines.

...begotten not made, one in being with the Father, through Him all
things were made....

precisely to keep people from saying things like "God created Jesus".
Jesus isn't *made* or *created*. It does you no good to quote scripture
which seems to prove that Jesus was created, because that's exactly
what the people did at the Council of Chalcedon and the Council of
Nicea, and they still got told that they were heretics when the whole
thing was over.

And as for:

	The Christian viewpoint, and the case for Christianity, always
	brings the argument to a discussion of Jesus.  It is no use
	trying to prove any basic Christan doctrine without discussing
	Christ himself.

This is a fairly modern view of Christianity, and one which is more
"Protestant" than "Roman Catholic" and also one that was not prevalent
during the middle ages. Read Anselem (sp?) of Cantebury on Jesus. His
entire notion of Jesus is based on his notion of God which is based on
his notion of feudalism, the government of his time. (His notion of God
was also based on th Greek ideal of perfection, but the feudal aspect
is more predomininant in his writings.)

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura