Active Users:1231 Time:23/11/2024 02:49:58 AM
I had not realized it was that late, but used it only as an example of multitudinous controversies. - Edit 1

Before modification by Joel at 07/10/2011 01:04:08 AM

Christians COMMONLY accepted most, if not all, of the Nicene Creed long before the Council of Nicaea. The Council was prompted by that commonly accepted beliefs growing erosion and muddling due to deliberate Gnostic and heretic assaults and a widespread vagueness and ignorance among NEW Christians only beginning to rigorously explore Christology. Thus the Church formally stated its Christology, clarifying what was indisputably Spirit breathed (e.g. the Gospel of John) and what was simply heresy (e.g. Monophysite denial of Christs humanity, Ebionite denial of His divinity, and Gnostic Trojan horses like the "Gospels" of Thomas and Judas.) The Councils of Nicaea and Ephesus brought order out of chaos by the Grace of God, but the idea Christianity had until then been an eclectic equivalent of Gnosticism that simply replaced "gnosis" with "Jesus" in not credible.

Monophysitism didn't even exist as a theology at the time of the Council of Nicaea, as far as I can tell from a quick look at the articles - it certainly didn't become a major controversy until the sixth century, two centuries after Nicaea. Nor is there any reason why monophysites should be considered to deviate from the Nicene Creed.

As it happens, that actually strengthens your case, though. The Copts, Ethiopian Christians and a few smaller groups have a theology that apparently is technically "miaphysite", but might as well be monophysite; this doesn't prevent them from adhering to the Nicene Creed.

I somewhat blurred the distinction between the Monophysite view of Christ as subsuming a fully human nature in a divine one and the Gnostic view of Christ as a wholly human enlightened/exalted man (which Joseph Smith also echoes in places.) My bad. At the risk of getting into the kind of semantics to which you just alluded, I do not think Monophysitism truly consistent with the Nicene affirmation that Jesus "was incarnate and was made man" or even Pauls biblical metaphor in Hebrews 2 that Jesus "was made a little lower than the angels" (which itself quotes Psalm 8, where the same phrase is explicitly used to indicate humanity.) In other words, while it was not one of the beliefs at which the Nicene Creed was directed, I do think it refuted by that creed.

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