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To: don-o
Link to full essay in my #102

Doesn't anyone want to engage in what a discussion?

Protestantism.

The truth of the Church was greatly distorted in the West after Rome had fallen away from the Church. In the West, God's kingdom began to be viewed more as an earthly kingdom.

Latinism obscured the Christian concept of the Church in the consciousness of its members with its legalistic account of good deeds, its mercenary relationship to God and its falsification of salvation.

Latinism gave birth to a legitimate, although very insubordinate, offspring in the form of Protestantism. Protestantism was created from the soil of humanism which was not a religious phenomenon; on the contrary, all its leading ideas are purely earthly, human.

It created respect for man in his natural condition. Protestantism, having carried over the basis of humanism into the religious field, was not a protest of genuine ancient Church Christian consciousness against those forms and norms which were created by medieval Papism, as Protestant theologians are often inclined to claim. Far from it; Protestantism was a protest on the very same plane.

It did not re-establish ancient Christianity, it only replaced one distortion of Christianity with another, and the new falsehood was much worse than the first.

Protestantism became the last word in Papism, and brought it to its logical conclusion.

106 posted on 12/31/2001 11:11:17 AM PST by don-o
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To: don-o
The falsification of the Church with Christianity leads to one other falsification - "the falsification of Christ the God-man with the man Jesus of Nazareth."

Just as the faith in the Church is inseparably linked with the acknowledgement of the divinity of Christ the Savior, so the denial of the Church unfailingly leads ultimately to the denial of the incarnation of the Son of God, the denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

It is not at all necessary for Him to be a God-man in order to give some kind of teaching. Christ's state of being God-man is necessary only when He is seen as the Savior, Who poured out strength into human nature and Who founded the Church.

In actual fact, is this inseparable tie between the truth of the Church and the truth of His being the Son of God not seen from the words of Jesus Christ Himself?

Simon Peter said: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Then Jesus said to him: thou art Peter, and upon this rock" (i.e., on the truth of the God-incarnation which Peter confessed). "I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:16, 18).

The ancient Church, in a special effort, with all its strength, defined this truth of the one-essence of the incarnate Son of God with God the Father, because it thirsted for a real renewal of human nature, for the re-creation of the "new creature," i.e., of the Church.

The internal motivating force of all the dogmatic movements of the fourth century was the unshakable belief in the fact that the Son of God is the second person of the Holy Trinity, Who came down to earth, became man, revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, founded His Church on earth, suffered for the sins of mankind and, having conquered death, arose from the dead, opening the path for the deification of man, not only in soul, but in body.

Why was the battle with Arianism so strenuous? Why did the Arians meet with such a repulse that Saint Athanasius the Great, that pillar of Christ's Church, refused them the name of "Christian"?

107 posted on 12/31/2001 11:26:22 AM PST by don-o
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