Sacred Mysteries: After 1700 years, Nicaea is still worth celebrating
I was wondering whether to pay a visit to Nicaea (now Iznik, in Turkey) for the 1700th anniversary of a momentous event there, but I was a bit put off by its not having a railway station.
Luckily the good fathers who gathered there in 325 were not so easily deterred. I suppose they travelled by horse, mule or foot from Constantinople, though a ship would have helped across the Sea of Marmara, or the Propontis as it was then known.
Worth celebrating now is that the bishops at the Council of Nicaea decided that Jesus Christ the Son of God is as much God as is God the Father. He wasn't just of a similar substance or being; he was of the same substance or being – 'God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made'.
That looks like the belief of the author of St John's Gospel, though the doctrine may not be easy to apply to a person who was also born and died, and, as Christians believed, rose again. The doctrine was important since, if Jesus was not fully human and fully divine, he would have been incapable of achieving atonement between God and humanity. We should have been left crushed by sin and death, unable to enter the gates of heaven. Since mankind has an unquenchable appetite for the infinite, we'd be in the most tragic of positions.
The religious party that wanted the bishops at Nicaea to regard the Son of God only as a creature like us were followers of Arius, an influential priest born in the 250s.
An anniversary issue on Nicaea has been printed by Communio (a learned theological journal founded in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI). In it, David M Gwynn considers how much Arius taught the errors attributed to him and how much his opponent St Athanasius should be regarded as the champion of orthodoxy. Dr Gwynn is reader in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway in the University of London.
Athanasius, he points out, was only a young priest of about 30 when he attended the council as assistant to Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria. But he suggests that Athanasius might have drafted Alexander's circular letter denouncing Arius.
Dr Gwynn writes that the teaching of Arius could not be called heresy then, as 'there were no established orthodox answers to resolve the questions under discussion'. Perhaps not, but if it contradicted points of doctrine held by Christians, it could have been seen as false.
Dr Gwynn quotes a summary by Athanasius of the doctrines of the Arians. 'Not always was the Son, for he was not until he was begotten… He is not proper to the essence of the Father, for he is a creature and a thing made… The Son does not know the Father exactly… He is not unchangeable, like the Father, but is changeable by nature, like the creatures.'
Dr Gwynn finds all these assertions in Arius's writings except for the last, for Athanasius's opponents repeatedly insisted that the Son was 'unchangeable and set apart from all other creatures'.
I don't know that this got the associates of Arius out of trouble. To be sure, being created is not being changed, since there was nothing to be changed from. But creation adds a new thing to the world of creatures, all susceptible to change. And to class the Son as a creature, even if set apart, distinguishes him from God in a way fatal to human salvation.
Anyway Dr Gwynn argues that over-simplifying Athanasius's story 'understates the scale of his contribution in defining and securing the orthodox faith'. I certainly wouldn't want that either.
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The Hill
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After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some, however, continued to practice not the religion that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are dying out, and there is growing certainty that their unique version of Christianity will die with them. Almost all are now elderly, and as the young move away to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this offshoot of Christianity — and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can still recite the Latin chants that his ancestors learned 400 years ago. 'It is sad to see this tradition end with our generation.' Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests had spectacular success converting warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see Christianity as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce, with thousands killed and the remaining believers chased underground. As Japan opened up to foreign influence, a dozen Hidden Christians clad in kimono cautiously declared their faith, and their remarkable perseverance, to a French Catholic priest in March 1865 in Nagasaki city. Many became Catholics after Japan formally lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to practice what their ancestors preserved during their days underground. In interviews with The Associated Press, Hidden Christians spoke of a deep communal bond stemming from a time when a lapse could doom a practitioner or their neighbors. Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns hiding precious ritual objects and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, with the observance of rituals unchanged since the 16th century. 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Yahoo
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This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it's love to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven. Or to believe it's compassion to scream invective at a woman entering an abortion clinic, which gets reimagined as "counseling" the women to stop sinning. These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful. Ernst's behavior also shows how it can be used to justify opposition to Republican hostility towards Jesus' call to care for the poor and the disabled, especially if doing so means a slightly higher tax rate for the wealthy. Holly Berkley Fletcher, the author of the upcoming book "The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism," explained this in her Monday newsletter. Evangelicals tell themselves they "prioritize saving souls for eternity over helping bodies in the here and now," she wrote. In reality, of course, it's a way "to avoid responsibility and reform and to serve their own interests." Ernst's implication that people should welcome suffering and death has a long and ignoble history. Fletcher notes slave owners used this message to bully enslaved people in the 19th century. In recent years, the idea was revived due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to justify Republican opposition to life-saving measures like social distancing, masks, and eventually, vaccination. By October 2020, Tucker Carlson of Fox News was sounding this message, declaring, "At some point we are all going to die. Dying is the central fact of life," and suggesting that was reason enough to pull back all public health measures. It was a message that got a huge boost from evangelicals, especially pastors at megachurches who didn't want to put church services online, depriving them of the adulation of the adoring crowd. Rev. Tony Spell of Louisiana drew headlines in early 2020 by declaring, "True Christians do not mind dying." Caleb Mathis, pastor at the enormous Crossroads Church of Ohio, wrote at the time, "I hope it's the end of the world," because he believes heaven "sounds pretty freakin' amazing." Even after the vaccine, Joy Pullman of The Federalist wrote an article titled, "For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing." In it, she argued, "There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter," and also "death is good." None of these folks live by their own pro-death rules, of course. They see a doctor or take other measures to protect their health. It's only when they're asked to help others, whether through vaccination or paying slightly more in taxes, that they find this duty in others to welcome death with a smile. But this is worse than the usual Republican hypocrisy. It also reflects the increasingly Christian nationalist bent of the GOP. They are explicitly arguing that everyone else has to live by their fundamentalist religious belief that death is good. You may be an atheist, a non-Christian, or a more liberal Christian who believes in healing the sick. Too bad for you. In the MAGA view, we're all members of their fanatical death cult, whether we like it or not. The good news is that Ernst's shut-up-and-die ideology is not popular, even with a lot of people who consider themselves conservative Christians. On Monday, Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten announced that he's challenging Ernst in the 2026 election. Scholten told the Des Moines Register, "When she doubled down on Saturday with her, I felt, very disrespectful comments, I was like, 'OK, game on.'" It's a long shot in a deep-red state, but Scholten has some advantages, including being the pitcher for the Sioux City Explorers. He also has a long history of advocating for universal health care, drawing a contrast with Ernst's nihilistic views. Iowa is considered conservative, but its voting population has a significantly higher percentage of elderly individuals compared to the rest of the country. They may be especially hostile to Ernst's suck-it-up-and-die message.
