Who is Jesus, Anyway?
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This quote, on Dmitri’s blog, is the perspective of most modern Christians:
What’s problematic with any Christian religion is when that denomenation or sect believe that their faith is superior to others. The very fact that you would even toy with the idea that your friends and loved-ones, whom you’ve known your entire lives, are living the life of heretics is truly upsetting.
Which is essentially this position:
What’s problematic with any …religion is when [they] believe that their faith is superior to others. The very fact that you would even toy with the idea that your friends and loved-ones, whom you’ve known your entire lives, are living the life of heretics is truly upsetting.
Modern Christians typically believe this because,
The schisms of the church have been around since the time of the 1st Apostles.
True enough. The first controversy arose over circumcision. Further on, Gnostics and Docetists denied the Incarnation.
Paul had to call out Peter on some things . . . I don’t understand why we can’t just believe in one thing and realize that everything else is tertiary.
Indeed, there was much controversy in the first century church. However, the controversy between Peter and Paul over the Gentiles did not divide them. They remained in communion with one another in the church.
Which one thing is it that we believe? That God is One? That God is a Trinity? That Jesus is the Son of God? That Jesus is God? That the Holy Spirit is God? That the Church is the body of Christ? That the Eucharist is Christ’s body and blood truly present to us? That Mary bore God in her womb and is therefore Theotokos and Mater Theou? That images of Christ and his saints are a necessary part of Christian worship?
These are all one thing for the Orthodox. Is that the one thing that we hold in common? Even to agree on all of those statements, what does it mean to say that Jesus is the Son of God? Is the Word of God uncreated or created at a point in time? It is never about “one thing.”
Long before I was Orthodox, I had many arguments with my classmates about whether these things were important or not. My point, and the point of traditional Christianity, is that the councils of the Church are necessary to give us that “core” that so many Christians, who have forgotten what it means to hold “the faith of our fathers,” take for granted.