From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage,alt.alien.visitors,sci.skeptic
Subject: Nicea and dogma etc.
Date: 3 Oct 92 22:46:05 GMT
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)

John_-_Winston@cup.portal.com writes:

> Dear Folks: The council that was held to change the bible was called 
> The Council of Nice. The word is spelled Nice but it is pronounced
> Nicea.

The Nicean Ecumenical Council of A.D. 319, was called by the Emperor
Constantine to settle the status of Jesus and invent the Trinity. Well,
not quite invent, but turn it from controversy into dogma.

Before Nicea, Jesus was God's Son. After Nicea, The Father, Son and Holy
Ghost were 'consubstantial' - at least the son was consubstantial with
the Father. Now this tooks months of debate to settle. And finally, it
wasn't any of the bishops who settled it, it was the Emperor, who wasn't
at the time even a baptized Christian.

The question of course related to whether Jesus was God or Man or both.
If he is God then he isn't man, and if he's man, he isn't God, according
to one argument. The other was that he was both man and God in one of a
number of sort of odd ways of reconciling contradictions.

Constantine's idea of "consubstantial" wasn't a bad political
compromise.

But as for re-writing the Bible, it's text was fixed a couple of
generations earlier. I don't recall anything from Nicea that disputes
the canon of the Bible.

But hey, I don't know everything. Maybe my profs and sources were lying.

But since Nicea had as its main problem the Trinitarian controvery, *IF*
that council had re-written the Bible, you'd think they would have stuck
in something about the Trinity. It is interesting that nowhere in the
Bible does the word "Trinity" appear and there are no direct references
to any sort of consubstantiality of the tri-partite godhead of
post-Nicean Christianity. The clostest is the gospel of John, chapter 1
(circa A.D. 90) where Logos, Son, and God are rather closely identified
with each other. But that is not the Nicean Trinity.

The Thomist Church of India, which claims to have been founded by St.
Thomas himself (as solid a claim as the Catholics' claim to St. Peter)
has no notion of Trintity at all.

If you want to look this up in the Encyclopedia, check out "Monophysite
Controversy". Or even "Monophysite Heresy". That's what the Trinitarians
(who won) called the other side. Their argument is that God is one, not
three. 

Then there was the council of Trent which added some stuff to the Canon,
which the Protestants later rejected, ergo the Catholic Bible has stuff
the Protestant Bible doesn't have. 

So John - I have to ask you for your sources. I *think* you're wrong on
historical detail here.

> Today is saturday and Lord willing I'll be taking off for Mt.
> Shasta in an hour or two. I wish that you all could take a drink from
> the 120 feet deep well that is on our property, it's really taste good.
> It would also be good if you could look up at the stars at night and 
> see the sky from an altitude of 4,490 feet. You can see more stars 
> than you ever dreamed possible. See  you on about tuesday.

I like clean water and stars. I also like the Northern Lights. We get
'em all here :-). We also have snow and ice and cold that gets so cold
that you can chop the clouds your breath makes with an axe and hear the
sound for miles and in the summer the sun never sets. But all that is
off topic. :-)

The Cree say that if you look at the Northern Lights, your soul will be
sucked up into heaven and the Indian kids are scared to look up at night
and think we white folks are real weird for geting kinks in our necks
watching the heavens explode in a cosmic light show. But that is
probably off topic too :-).

Have a good weekend.

<wink, nudge>

=Doug


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