A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

However, mainstream Christian teaching soon came to accept that Jesus was
divine. In retrospect, this was perhaps the most significant development ever to
take place in Christian theology. It further distanced Christianity from Judaism
and, in so far as any empirical evidence for a divine presence is difficult to
discern, it meant that there would be acute speculation about the nature of that
divinity, especially in an intellectual tradition as sophisticated as that of the
Greeks. In his Voting about God in Early Christian Councils, Ramsay
MacMullen lists fifty key theological issues raised in the debates of the
following years. They include the more philosophical, such as ‘Does “like”
mean “identical”?’; the theological, ‘Was Christ a man indwelt by God?’; the
quasi-scientific, ‘Is God’s substance increased or divided in begetting?’; and the
more esoteric, ‘Did Christ’s existence begin in the womb or at birth?’ 1 As we
have seen, the Greek philosophical tradition was as alive in the Christian world
as it was within paganism.
It was not only Jesus’ relationship to God the Father that was difficult to
define. Any attempt to relate Jesus’ divinity to his humanity was similarily
fraught with difficulty. The great third-century theologian Origen recognised the
intractability of the problem: ‘Of all the marvellous and splendid things about
him [Jesus], there is one that utterly transcends the capacity of our weak mortal
intelligence to think of or understand, namely how this mighty power of the
divine majesty, the very Word of the Father, and the very Wisdom of God ... can
be believed to have existed within the compass of that man who appeared in
Judaea ... When we see him in some things so human that he appears in no way
to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and in some things so divine that
they are appropriate to nothing else but the primal and ineffable nature of deity,
the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled.’ 2 In the fourth
century, asceticism became increasingly important, and with it a denigration of
the human body. This made it even more difficult to imagine why Jesus should
have adopted flesh. As the theologian Gregory of Nyssa put it in one of his
Catechetical Orations of the 380s: ‘Why did the divine descend to such
humiliation? Our faith staggers at the thought that God, the infinite,
inconceivable and ineffable deity, who transcends all glory and majesty, should
be clothed with the defiled nature of man, so that his sublime activities are
abased through being united with what is so degraded.’ 3 Equally baffling was
the issue raised in the Arius and Alexander debate, the moment and context in
which Jesus was, or was not, created by God the Father.