Protestantism

» Migisi - Nicea

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People can believe in something, but differ on how to explain it or understand it.
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How can people believe in something they can't understand or explain?
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Quoting from:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/shabir.ally/new...
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"Where do you meet, in the New Testament, the phraseology which abounds in Trinitarian books and which necessarily grows from the doctrine of two natures in Jesus? Where does this divine teacher say, "this I speak as God, and this as man; this is true only of my human mind, this only of my divine?" Where do we find in the Epistles a trace of this strange phraseology? Nowhere. It was not needed in that day. It was demanded by the errors of a later age.
We believe, then that Christ is one mind, one being, and, I add, a being distinct from the one God. That Christ is not the one God, not the same being with the father, is a necessary inference from our former head, in which we saw that the doctrine of three persons in God is a fiction . . . . Jesus, in his preaching, continually spoke of God. The word was always in his mouth. We ask, does he by this word ever mean himself? We say, never. On the contrary, he most plainly distinguishes between God and himself, and so do his disciples."
--- (William Ellery Channing, Unitarian Christianity and Other Essays, edited by Irving H. Bartlett (U.S.: Liberal Arts Press, 1957) pp. 17-18)
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"Channing contends that since the doctrine of the two natures is "so strange, so difficult, so remote from all the previous conceptions of men," it would have been taught with utmost clarity in the Bible had it been a necessary belief for Christians. But no such teaching can be found in the Bible. Some Christians say, however, that some passages ascribe divine qualities to Jesus and others human qualities. To reconcile all these necessitates the said doctrine. Channing replies that those passages that seem to ascribe divine qualities to Jesus can be easily explained without resorting to the doctrine. He regards with disdain what he understands to be the solution proposed by other Christians: "In other words, for the purpose of reconciling certain difficult passages, which a just criticism can in a great degree, if not wholly, explain, we must invent a hypothesis vastly more difficult, and involving gross absurdity. We are to find our way out of a labyrinth by a clue which conducts us into mazes infinitely more inextricable." (p. 17)
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There WAS widespread agreement with Paul that Jesus was God. Hardly anyone questioned that.
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Not so. Arius and other Oneness believers, and Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia did question and attack the idea that Jesus was God. Controversy on that issue was so heated and widespread that it gave cause to convene the council in the first place.

-- posted by Migisi