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Latest revision as of 03:16, 26 December 2012

The heavy stuff

Orthodox Christian theology holds that the three Persons of the Holy Trinity are co-equal in all respects. (ie, none is greater or lesser than the other in terms of the usual God-like attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence).

What does this mean? Well, right at the beginning, one of the schismatic battles that threatened to rip the religion apart concerned the precise status of Jesus Christ as part of the Godhead. The Arian group - even tually branded heretical when they lost the argument - not unreasonably took the point of view that while God is eternal and has been around since before Day One, Jesus Christ was created at a point in time for a particular purpose, and therefore had no objective existance prior to his conception and earthly birth. Therefore Jesus fails on the omnipresence clause - for a long time he had no existance and could not have been present, for nistance, at the Creation or during the struggles of the Old Testament era. And every Son is subordinate to his Father, in the natural order of things. Besides, he only rose to Godhood after his death and resurrection -during his earthly ministry he was neither omnipotent nor omniscient.

This view was overturned and decreed heretical in favour of what is still the dominant theology - the co-equality of the three Persons of the Trinity. (Had the Arians won the battle, Christianity would not be a trinitarian faith; we'd be Unitarian). A theological argument was cobbled together to support the necessary consequence of the trinitarian argument - that Jesus had also been created in eternity, and was God since Day One, and that He had willingly taken a sabbatical from Godhood to be born as a human male and perform his earthly ministry.

This necessarily involved the idea that prior to his earthly incarnation, with no direct experience of what it was to be human, the energy that became Jesus Christ had high status in Heaven and because of its destiny to become Man/God, had an affinity with the material, human, creation. But it would at this time have had a chillier, less compassionate, more detached, aspect, as it would not have had any direct gnosis concerning what it was to be human. It is also believed, by more mystic Christian thinkers such as the Rosicrucians, that this aspect of Christ remained in Heaven, keeping the throne warm, so to speak, during his earthly ministry. This was, of course, the High and Holy Metatron of the Seventy-Two Names...--AgProv 10:08, 11 June 2008 (UTC)