Well, it’s become about Mary and the best thing to safeguard the correct understanding of Christ is good teaching.
Besides, it doesn’t affect Jesus if someone denies either His divinity or His humanity. He doesn’t need someone to stick up for Him. What it does make a difference to is the person who denies either aspect because then they aren’t believing in the Christ of Scripture and that false Jesus is not someone who can save them.
I know one thing, though, and that’s that many people come to Christ and are saved by Him without having all of their theology all hammered out ahead of time. Some people haven’t been raised with the theological teaching necessary to get an in depth understanding of who Jesus really is but they do know that He can save and He does.
Then the Holy Spirit will take care of the details.
I know one thing, though, and that’s that many people come to Christ and are saved by Him without having all of their theology all hammered out ahead of time. Some people haven’t been raised with the theological teaching necessary to get an in depth understanding of who Jesus really is but they do know that He can save and He does.
Then the Holy Spirit will take care of the details.
>>That’s why the First Council of Nicaea was wrong, right? It was defined by Catholic bishops, so it has to be wrong.
Hey if the Church got it wrong at the Council of Ephesus, maybe it got Nicaea wrong as well like Dan Brown claims.
Or maybe the early fathers were just wrong when they discussed the books that belonged in the New Testament.
I’m gonna agree a bit with you here. We’re not all tasked to be theologians.
However, there are some basics that need to be orthodox and clearly taught since “ the best thing to safeguard the correct understanding of Christ is good teaching.”
We’re having a theological discussion here, one about correct teaching. We teach that if you have a problem acknowledging Mary as Theotokus, this quite likely concerns a problem of understanding about Christ.
We’re seeing how this comes out here on this thread.
Spot on! as the Brits say. But the fact that "it's become about Mary" is precisely due to lack of good teaching, which we see in this thread: folks objecting to calling Mary "Theotokos" are unwittingly coming up with most of the classical christological heresies. If one starts with Christ (as one ought) and holds rightly that Jesus is fully God, existing from before the ages, and fully Man, born of the Virgin, yet is one Christ, one person, not a divine person united to a human person, but one person subsisting in two natures, the title is a simply natural and correct expression of the truth of who Jesus Christ is. If one starts with some preconceived notion of the nature of motherhood and dwells on it, rather than on who Christ is, or starts with an erroneous conception of Christ, the title seems blasphemous or absurd.
And indeed the Holy Spirit does take care of details. . ."lead[s] into all truth" as Our Lord put it.
However, most of what is going on here has to do with disagreements about how the Holy Spirit takes care of details. Those of us (whether Orthodox or Latin) who understand Scripture in the context of Holy Tradition, knowing that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and always, see the Holy Spirit taking care of details throughout the history of the Church, and refer to that experience -- the promise that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth applied as much to the bishops who gathered in the Ecumenical Councils, to those we call the Fathers of the Church and to all the other saints down the ages as it does to us today. We can point to the first time erroneous ideas about Christ, which still come up, gained sufficient currency that the Church, led by the Holy Spirit, was obliged to act to ensure "good teaching", by issuing a condemnation of the wrong idea. Most prominently, when the wrong idea (heresy) roiled the whole Church, it was the Ecumenical Councils that issued these condemnations. Even peasants in traditionally Orthodox countries, with no theological training know that ours is the "Church of the Seven Councils" and have some idea about what the Councils taught, so this isn't a matter for learned theologian only. Orthodox hymnography -- from which pious peasants learn such things -- refers to the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils as "the Harps of the Spirit".
Others on the thread and out in the world (esp. those who use "Bible" or "biblical" as an adjective to describe their faith) fancy somehow that they with their Bible are going to be lead by the Spirit into all truth, then come different conclusions from those to whom that same promise applied in ages past (notably the bishops who gathered in the Ecumenical Councils), indeed different conclusions from the consensus of those to whom that promise applied down the ages, and deprecate the teaching of the ancient and undivided Church as "RC tradition". And, as we've seen on this thread, as often as not, such folk end up preaching one of the classical christological heresies, be it the coarse monophysitism of Apollinarius in which God assumed only a human body, not our complete nature (excepting sin), a version of the "adoptionism" of Paul of Samosata, or Nestorianism with God the Word somehow distinguished from the One Born of the Virgin.