Theological Crisis and Council—The Trinity

Lecture 18

T

he territorial rivalries we discussed in the last lecture provide the
backdrop to the tumultuous theological controversies concerning
God and Christ that threatened to fragment the newly “triumphant”
Christianity in the 4th and 5th centuries. In this lecture and the next, we will
try to explain these controversies as they developed over time. We will
consider first the question of the Trinity: Who or what is the Christian God,
after all? Then we will turn, as the disputes themselves did, to the question of
Christ: Who or what was the Messiah who stands at the center of Christian
belief and piety?

A Preoccupation with Belief
• Among world religions, Christianity is distinctively preoccupied
with matters of belief; controversies over the elements of belief
dominated religious and political struggles in imperial Christianity
for several centuries. The question arises: Why was the precise
content of belief so critical to Christians when it was not for their
Jewish and Gentile neighbors?
o The answer lies in origins. Christianity is a religion of
choice; it began as a Jewish sect that professed Jesus as
Messiah (in contrast to possible other anointed ones) and as
Lord (in contrast to other masters). Intellectual commitment
is at the heart of the movement, and this commitment had
definite content.

o As a religious hairesis (“sect, party”), moreover, it inherited the

convictions of Greco-Roman and Jewish philosophical schools.

The universal premise in philosophy was that right thinking

was the basis for right practice, just as bad practice was rooted

in corrupt thinking. Philosophical schools competed with each

other over the precise character of right thinking and engaged

in polemic against each other: One school had to be correct and

others wrong.