Paul Tillich once remarked that...
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Paul Tillich once remarked that "the study of theology is the ultimate blasphemy!" Theologians have an impossible task. They are seeking to define the indefinable; to speak about the ineffable; to discuss God as if he were an object (as rocks are the object of the study of geology) when always God is subject.
So great is this problem that it took the church 300 years even to produce the great Nicene Creed.
So soon as we begin to think about Jesus, we are faced with two heresies. If we regard Jesus as Divine and his body only spirit (a 'seeming body' from the Greek Dokei) this is not true to the gospel revelation. This is known as Docetism and among those who hold this view is the Christian Science Church. At the other extreme are the Unitarians who deny that Jesus is divine, anymore than an Isaiah had a divine revelation. But Jesus is both human and divine. "For the divine nature was his from the beginning first; yet he did not think to snatch at equality with God but made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave."
As Reinhold Niebuhr expressed it. "It is the impossible possible."
-- Docherty
So great is this problem that it took the church 300 years even to produce the great Nicene Creed.
So soon as we begin to think about Jesus, we are faced with two heresies. If we regard Jesus as Divine and his body only spirit (a 'seeming body' from the Greek Dokei) this is not true to the gospel revelation. This is known as Docetism and among those who hold this view is the Christian Science Church. At the other extreme are the Unitarians who deny that Jesus is divine, anymore than an Isaiah had a divine revelation. But Jesus is both human and divine. "For the divine nature was his from the beginning first; yet he did not think to snatch at equality with God but made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave."
As Reinhold Niebuhr expressed it. "It is the impossible possible."
-- Docherty
