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General Christian

2012-10-17T16:21:43-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 10: Suspicions and Semantics

Last updated on: October 17, 2012 at 4:21 pm By K. Mulhern

In our last post, we met some actual characters in the dialogue. Let’s all step back just a moment and widen our lens so we can get a panoramic view. While the Nicene Creed is the heart of our story, the provoking cause of its writing, the actual Council members who wrote it and the decades that followed are all a package. That is, it’s not a tidy tale of a theological conflagration that erupted and its orderly resolution. In... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:04:07-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 9: Cast of Characters, Better than a Russian Novel

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:04 pm By K. Mulhern

Inside of the oldest church in Egypt We have a significant cast of characters when we talk about 4th-5th-century controversies. It might be helpful if we first listed them up front, sort of like a Russian novel giving all the main players and their relationships in a list before the story gets started. The interesting thing about really believing that God is involved in history, not just back then there, but in an ongoing way—speaking, acting, moving, informing, shaping, inspiring,... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:04:56-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 8: What Makes a Heretic?

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:04 pm By K. Mulhern

The brouhaha began because people wanted to understand, they wanted to explain, they wanted to feel comfortable with mystery. Perfectly understandable. When I teach church history courses, I try to help us all appreciate the value that heretics bring to the table. [Don’t unsubscribe just yet…hang with me.] None of our early thinkers planned to be a heretic, scheming and wringing hands in evil glee at the prospect of skewing truth and making a mess of good Christian doctrine. Early... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:05:49-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 7: Before Nicaea

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:05 pm By K. Mulhern

We may wonder why all this Trinitarian fuss arises in the 4th century… 300 years after Christ. Why didn’t they figure all this out long before? I don’t propose to give you 300 years of church history in this post, but let me give you some handles on those years that can help explain why the Creed was written when it was. The first thing we have to recognize is that for most of those years, being a Christian could... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:06:43-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 6: Two Starting Principles

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:06 pm By K. Mulhern

When Anatolios tells us that there are two fundamental principles that must undergird our explorations of the history around early church Trinitarian thinking, he’s giving us two archaeological ‘findings’. That is, as historians scour the documents of the first centuries of the church, they find two commonalities in all the talk about the Trinity, the nature of God, and the divinity of Christ. Anatolios is telling us that there are, essentially, two ‘items’ in the layer of early church history... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:07:39-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 5: Mystagogy, Event Horizons, and the Nicene Creed

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:07 pm By K. Mulhern

We’re exploring the idea of a Christian spirituality that is more thoroughly grounded in the Trinity, a teaching that is difficult, sometimes cryptic, and all too often inconsequential in actual Christian life and practice. We’re using Khaled Anatolios’ book (Retrieving Nicaea) as our guide, but his book is not primarily a theological study of Trinitarian doctrine. This is a good place to pick up on the pearly gates image from our last post. My concern (not necessarily Anatolios’) is that... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:08:35-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 4: A Third Modern Approach

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:08 pm By K. Mulhern

In our travelogue thus far, Anatolios has been laying some groundwork for our understanding of the Trinity by pointing out some very common perspectives that he thinks are defective in some way. (And if you notice, on the right hand column of these posts, there is a menu of earlier posts for your rereading reference.) First, we considered the idea that the truth that God is mystery means we can know nothing, really, about him except what he has done... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:09:26-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 3: Modern Approach #2

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:09 pm By K. Mulhern

If our first contemporary approach to Trinitarian spirituality led to an essential discontinuity between God’s actions and God’s being, this second modern approach does the exact opposite. That is, it conflates God’s action and God’s being, it collapses them into the same thing. But wait, isn’t that what we wanted in our last post? Some recognition that God’s actions said something true and essential about God’s being? Yes, that’s exactly what we need. And this seems to provide just that.... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

2012-10-18T16:10:11-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 2: Modern Approach #1

Last updated on: October 18, 2012 at 4:10 pm By K. Mulhern

To be a Christian in the Traditional sense means to be Trinitarian. They have always gone together. We have not always had the language we use to describe ourselves as Trinitarian. The word “Trinity” (trinitas) was probably coined by a north African thinker by the name of Tertullian, who was born around A.D. 160. He didn’t “invent” the idea; he simply found a word that was trying to express what the Church had already been teaching and practicing. That is,... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

experience

history

Trinity

2012-09-25T11:19:40-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Trinitarian Spirituality, 1: The First Question Must Be Why?

Last updated on: September 25, 2012 at 11:19 am By K. Mulhern

Note to Reader: This series on Trinitarian Spirituality explores the history and spirituality behind the shaping of the Nicene Creed using Khaled Anatolios’ Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) as guide and inspiration. It’s best to begin at the beginning: An Introduction. ___________________________ The classic terms in historical and theological studies in regard to the Trinity are in Greek: ousia and hypostases. Ousia means, roughly, substance; hypostases means, roughly, existence.... Read more

Trinitarian Spirituality: a series

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