Rethinking God VI

Blessed John Henry Newman

champion of listening to the

faithful

A major player in in the debate over the divinity of Christ was a priest from Alexandria in Egypt by the name of Arius. Arius lived at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth.  Trying to preserve the traditional view on the Unity of God—that God is One—Arius would not ascribe full divinity of Christ.  As I posted yesterday, the received Tradition from Judaism: “ Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One,” the prayer known as the Shema Yisrael  taken from Deuteronomy 6:4, created a huge problem for Christians in the first six centuries as they tried to reconcile the Unity of God with the Divinity of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  The idea of the Father being God, the Son being God and the Holy Spirit being God sounded too much like three gods to a lot of people.  Arianism acknowledged that Christ shares in Divinity but to a lesser degree than the Father.  While still an Anglican before his becoming a Catholic in 1845, Blessed John Henry Newman had written a study of Arius and history published under the title: The Arians of the Fourth Century.  Arius was opposed by Saint Athanasius, the secretary to Arius’ bishop, Alexander, but according to Newman the majority of bishops in the Church had accepted the Arian theology.  It was only at the Council of Nicea that the bishops—at the urging of Athanasius, defined that Christ is consubstantial (one in being) with the Father—that is, that Christ shares fully in the same Divine Nature as the Father.  Incidentally only 318 bishops out of the 1800 Constantine had invited came to the Council—a very small minority.)  While the majority of bishops had originally agreed with Arius, the laity and the lower clergy—the faithful—had held to faith in Christ’s divinity. Newman always remembered this and years later as a Catholic wrote his famous essay “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” Newman argued—with quite a bit of opposition in his day—that the magisterium needs to pay close attention to the faith of the People of God. The laity are not merely to be instructed by the pastors of the Church but the pastors must remember that the Faith of the Church is that which is held in the hearts of the Faithful and therefore those who teach need to be in tune with the faithful.  This is something to pay attention to today.  Too many think that it is up to the Bishops to teach and the faithful to listen but if the bishops are teaching something other than that which is in the faith held by the people, the bishops are not teaching the faith of the Church.  The faith of the Church is no more and no less than the faith put into the hearts of the People of God by the Holy Spirit.  There are those in the Church today who are upset that the faithful are not listening to the bishops when they teach but maybe we should be more concerned that the bishops have not been listening to the faithful before they teach.    

Origins (and Origen) of the Coptic Church

The Cathedral of Saint Mark in Cairo, Seat of the
Patriarch and Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church

In our last entry I wrote about Pope Shenouda III and how the Coptic Orthodox Church emerged out of one of the five great Patriarchates of Christianity, the Patriarchate of Alexandria which traces its origins back to the Evangelist Mark. 

     I want to look a bit at the Coptic Orthodox Church because it is one of the Christian Communities of the Near East that is in grave danger today.   Blog entries of December 24^th and 26^th spoke of the Palestinian and Iraqi Christian communities and I had always intended to get back to the Coptic Christians of Egypt but there is so much happening these past few months to comment on that I haven’t had the chance to do an entry on the Copts. 

      In the ancient world of Greek and Roman culture, the first three centuries of the Christian, or Common, Era, Alexandria—situated on the Mediterranean coast at the Nile Delta was the great center of learning where Philosophers and scientists met and exchanged idea.  The philosophy of the day was neo-Platonism and it was in Alexandria that Plotinus, probably the most influential of the Neo-Platonists studied.  In addition to the Greek and Roman pagan philosophers, it was also a center of Jewish studies, having a huge Jewish community. Some scholars think from the evidence of certain medical and scientific knowledge available in Alexandria that there may have been Buddhist monks from India in Alexandria.  That is not as farfetched as it may sound because we know the trade routes took sailors and merchants down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to Indian ports. There was an ancient synagogue dating to this era in the city of Cochin in Kerala. Christians gravitated to Alexandria as well, Alexandria becoming the catechetical center of ancient Christianity with Clement of Alexandria, Athenagoras, and Origen all teaching there.  At the time of the Council of Nicea it was a priest from Alexandria by the name of Arius that had triggered the heresy of Arianism which the Council was called to correct, but it was also a Patriarch of Alexandria Athanasius who led the opposition to the heresy.  Indeed Athanasius is the personification of Christological orthodoxy. 

     It was only in the fifth century at the time of the Council of Chalcedon the Church of Alexandria (and several other Oriental Churches) could not agree with the Churches of Constantinople and Rome regarding the precise way in which Divinity and Humanity are each and both characteristic of Jesus.  This is a complicated issue—far more complicated than I want to get into here and far more complicated than I need to get into here—and so let us just say that while agreeing that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, they differed on precisely how that should be explained.  

      While it may seem a bit trivial to us, or at least while we may see that there is essential agreement and the disagreement is more a matter of definition, it was a serious enough difference that the Chalcedonian Churches (Rome and Constantinople) no longer shared Eucharistic fellowship with the Churches that did not accept the doctrine as defined by the Council of Chalcedon (451). 

Egypt was part of the Byzantine Empire and the Imperial Court ascribed to the Chalcedonian formula—consequently the Emperor made life very difficult for the Christians of Egypt who rejected the Council’s doctrines.  It was a case of Christian persecuting Christian and ultimately it undermined the place of Egypt in the Empire.  In 639 when the Arab armies came into Egypt, the loyalty of the people to the Emperor in Constantinople had been weakened by these religious disputes, empowering the conquerors to take Egypt into the Caliphate without much resistance.  While initially the vast majority of Egyptians remained Christians, over the next six centuries through intermarriage and for economic advantage most of the Egyptian population had become Muslim.  Today between 10 and 12 percent of the Egyptian people are Coptic Christians.   More on this next time.