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Augustine of Hippo

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8 pointslordleft3 comments

"The most controversial doctrine associated with him, the filioque, was rejected by the Eastern Orthodox Church."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque

I wonder how much ordinary people over the thousands of years in the Western Churches and the Eastern churches care about this sort of stuff.

And today we think internet fandom nerd rages and so on are bad....but the modern day nerdy internet forum rage over minutia of anime and other stuff is similar to the doctrinal rage and discussion like the Filioque.

The word fandom comes from fan which comes from fanatic. And many nerdy things like gaming and superheroes and so on seem to operate on the same level as religion in the minds of people in terms of the neural pathways and you get the same effects perhaps...

EDIT: I forgot to say what filioque is. From the wikipedia article:

Filioque , a Latin term meaning "and from the Son", was added to the original Nicene Creed, and has been the subject of great controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity. The term refers to the Son, Jesus Christ, with the Father, as the one shared origin of the Holy Spirit. It is not in the original text of the Creed, attributed to the First Council of Constantinople (381), which says that the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father" (Greek: τὸ ἐκ του Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον) without the addition "and the Son"

In terms importance the Nicene Creed is pretty fundamental to Christianity. The creed itself is not on the same level as the Gospel, but the ideas espoused in the creed are a reflection of what defines Christianity as Christianity.

Namely that there is One God that is "The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit" and that the Son died for our salvation, etc. The "Holy Trinity".

This is very defining. It is what separates Christianity from things like Rabbinical Judaism, Islam, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gnosticism, etc. Despite how similar and overlapping these things are to Christianity they don't believe in the Holy Trinity and many other details mentioned in the Nicene Creed.

So there is no surprise that they took any changes to the creed extremely seriously in the 5th Century and onward.

As far as Theology debates and how it resembles modern fandom... Yes, actually, a lot of it was actually fan service. These people loved the Church, they loved the Bible, and they loved God. It was a central obsession in their lives and they enjoyed debating and arguing over things just like people do today over football, cars, movies, and other things people enjoy/love etc.

The difference is the level of dedication and rigor these people engaged in. Few people could afford to spend their lives engaging in these philosophical pursuits, but the ones that could took it very very seriously. Theology is not only the study of God, but the study of the structure of reality itself.

It is from Theological debates of the medieval eras were we get things like peer reviews and the scientific process/inquiry.

This 2003 paper by the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, "The Filioque: A Church Dividing Issue?: An Agreed Statement", goes into much greater detail and nuance about the filioque and how it differs (if at all) from Orthodox theology: https://www.usccb.org/resources/filioque-a-church-dividing-i... TL;DR: It argues that the filioque is consonant with well-accepted Eastern Orthodox theology, but also recommends that it be dropped from the Latin version of the creed in the interests of ecumenism. There's always been alot of shared doctrine between all the (little-o) orthodox churches--Western, Eastern, Oriental, Syrian, etc--that was left out of the Nicene Creed. The creed was never meant to be comprehensive/exclusive, only the minimum necessary to refute perceived contemporary heresies, similar to earlier versions of the creed and the creeds it was derived from.

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