One would hope – after a big shindig like the Council of Nicaea, with the Emperor Constantine and all the important bishops meeting, debating, and deciding – that the fog surrounding Christian theology would lift, everyone would see Truth, and we would all live happily ever after!  Despite each one of us having a lifetime of experience watching one conflict transform into another, and then into still another, we cling to our false hopes.  Oh well, onward and upward…

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Despite the apparent agreement at Nicaea on the two natures of Christ, major controversies persisted, not to mention a host of other theological disputes.  Instead of a unified church after Nicaea, Christianity was divided among several rival groups, each tied to a particular political bloc, language, culture, and a different theology about the nature of God.  By 600 A.D., the Christian world had broken into four major parts:

Byzantium, centered in Constantinople, held that Christ had two natures – both fully human and fully divine.  This was the seat of imperial rule and control, and it sought to exert its control over the other three divisions.

The Miaphysites, centered in Egypt and Syria, believed Christ possessed one united nature, in which the human and divine natures were fused together.  They bristled at the notion implied by previous councils that there were two Christs.  These churches existed under Byzantine rule but opposed the Imperial theology.

Persian Christianity, centered in present-day Iran, held that Christ has two distinct natures.  They distinguished between the Divine Logos and the human Jesus.  These were the Nestorians, who considered both the divine and human natures of Christ to be fully real and complete, and not fused into a single entity.  Of note, this church built one of the most remarkable missionary networks in history.  By the seventh century, they had Christian communities in Persia, Central Asia, India, and China.  A stele in Xi’an from 781 A.D. records this expansion.

Latin Christianity, located in the former Western Roman Empire and centered in Rome.  This church emphasized a strong institutional hierarchy with bishops, priests, and deacons, and a growing papal authority.  This branch of Christianity was the smallest, both geographically and in population.

Thus, the Eastern part of the Empire had three competing Christian doctrines, each of which regarded the others as heretical.  Into this divided Christian world, a new revelation was proclaimed and a new religion born – Islam.

Islam spread with ferocious intensity.  In 632 A.D., the prophet Mohammed died.  And by 636, the Byzantine army was defeated at Yarmouk.  By 640, Egypt had been conquered, and in 651 the Persian Empire collapsed.  Thus, within 20 years, the entire Near East changed hands.  Prior to Islam, the Middle East was the most Christian region on earth.  After Islam, it gradually became Muslim – a process that occurred over centuries.

The Muslim political and military conquests did not destroy a unified Christian civilization.  Rather, it entered a world where Christianity was already fragmented into rival theological cultures, and this helped make the Arab conquests possible.  On a side note, the taxes imposed on non-Muslims, the jizya tax, were often lighter than Byzantium’s imperial taxation.  In effect, for many, the new rulers were less burdensome than the Byzantine rulers.

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So let’s look briefly at some of the other theological controversies of the time.  

There was the Pneumatomachian controversy, which explored the nature of the Holy Spirit.  Basically, the Church wondered about the nature of the Holy Spirit, whether the Spirit was divine or some subordinate power.  While the bishops concluded that the Holy Spirit was a constituent and co-equal part of God, they didn’t spend much ink on the matter.  They declared that the Holy Spirit was “Lord and giver of life, and who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”  Parenthetically, this seems to contradict the opening of John’s gospel, which states that all things came into being through the Logos, not through the Spirit.  In any case, this controversy resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity as we now know.

The Apollinairian controversy revolved around the mind of Christ.  While it was clear that Jesus had a human body, Apollinarus wondered whether Jesus' mind was the divine Logos rather than a rational human soul.  In effect, he thought Jesus had a human body, but with a divine mind.  This was settled at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which established the principle that Christ is fully human and fully divine.

The Nestorian controversy revolved around the nature of Christ.  It explored the notion that Christ’s two natures – human and divine – might actually indicate two separate persons.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 determined that Christ was one person, not two.

The Monophysite crisis taught that Christ’s humanity was absorbed into the divine nature after Jesus was incarnate.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 pronounced that Christ exists in two natures, without confusion, division, or separation.

While most people who explore these matters grasp the theological nature of these controversies, they often miss the political dimension of these battles.  These conflicts also concerned control of the five major patriarchates of the time: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.  Each doctrinal dispute was often aligned with regional political rivalries.

By the end of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christianity had defined four major elements.  It had decided upon a fixed Trinitarian doctrine, a defined Christology, and a hierarchical episcopal structure.  It had also solidified its alliance with imperial authority.  These four elements would dominate institutional Christianity for the next thousand years.

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I think it’s easy for us to take these controversies lightly because we have only known their result – the institutional Church and its monolithic structure.  We have never lived in an era that questioned these doctrines; we have never entertained opposing positions regarding these matters.  Most of us have never thought about religion as something existential, as a life-or-death affair.  As a result, these controversies seem unimportant, even trivial.  After all, what difference does any of this make?

Yet, if you take religion and the spiritual life seriously, these are matters of absolute importance.  Come to think of it, you can make a pretty good case that what you do spiritually will affect your outcome for all eternity, right?

Several years ago, I had breakfast with two Muslim friends, one a Muslim cleric and the other a physician.  In our discussion, they commented on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  They were quite puzzled by this formulation of God, coming as they did from a strict monotheism.  They understood the concept of God as Father, and from that, the notion of God as Son followed quite naturally.  What they couldn’t understand was the notion of the Holy Spirit; it just didn’t make sense to them.  They speculated that perhaps the idea of this third part of the Trinity was simply a mistake – perhaps a mistranslation of some key word in the distant past or something like that.

I was stunned into silence by their conclusion.  I had never questioned this element of our Christian theology before.  Their discussion brought to mind the larger and unstated issue: how do we determine what is real and true in spiritual matters?

Certainly, when you have an avatar like Jesus, you can trust what he has to say.  The impact of someone with his extraordinary spiritual powers will always impress his listeners as the Truth.  But the truth that we hide from ourselves is that we ourselves have not heard from Jesus directly.  We assume that reading Scripture is the same as having a conversation with Jesus.  It’s not!  

We have heard reports of what Jesus said: reports from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and reports from Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and others.  We don’t know how their biases have distorted Jesus’s actual teaching.  We also know that these teachings have been filtered through the 2000 years of Christianity’s existence.  During most of these intervening years, spiritual matters were repeatedly confused with political expediency.  As a result, there are multiple levels where spiritual matters have been compromised and distorted by the various political processes that have contaminated the truth of Jesus’s teachings.

All of this leaves the Church in a most difficult place today.  We are pretty confident that Jesus spoke the truth.  After all, he was the person who said that he himself was “the way, the truth, and the life.”  It seems unlikely that a liar would make such a claim.  But beyond that, it’s hard to know where to turn for the truth about spiritual matters.

Thankfully, we have a chain of Christian mystics who have dedicated their lives to following Jesus, who have done their best to embody his holy teachings.  Not only that, but the teachings of these Christians are mostly congruent with the teachings of mystics from other religious traditions.  As a result, I believe we can proceed with confidence, trusting them.  More on this in future newsletters.

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We have taken quite the excursion into ancient church history these past several weeks.  I hope I haven’t bored you or lost too many of you in the process.  Now, with this as our basis, we can turn to what all of this means for us today.  In a word, we will start looking for the nuggets of theological truth hidden amid all this talk of church history.  We will begin next week with an in-depth exploration of the very strange notion of Original Sin.  I hope you will join me because the next few newsletters will focus on sorting out theological truths from the political BS.

In the meantime, please remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  Take some time to let go of your thinking, to let go of all the busyness in your life, and just BE.  The promise is this:  when we find our own being, we enter into the Being of God, and in the process, we realize that the Kingdom is truly within us.

Rest in the loving embrace of our Lord!  Let his loving-kindness bring you to your deepest fulfillment!

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.