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Comment by jswelker

I find the Nicene Creed to be a major stumbling block as a person of Christian faith with a background in formal philosophy. Rather than accepting the inherent paradoxes in Christ's message, it attempts to shoehorn it together using the philosophical swiss army knife of the era, Neoplatonism.

As a result, now Christian orthodoxy is saddled with neoplatonic philosophical vestigial baggage in the term "consubstantial", which means Christians are wedded to and forced to defend a hard metaphysical realism. This comes out hard in Augustine and later medieval Christians. (See Anselm, Aquinas, etc)

They described the faith using the intellectual tools of their era, and now those artifacts are hard-coded into the faith. It would be like if the Nicene fathers were in the early 20th century and described the faith in terms of Theosophy and branded all non Theosophists heretics forever.

parent jswelker 10 months ago

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