Council of Nicea at the 1,700th Anniversary

For the first 500 years of its life the christian church worked on thinking about the divine nature of Jesus without appearing to suggest that there are multiple gods: one nature/substance (homoousios), three persons (hypostases). Roughly.

For 500 years after Chalcedon the challenge was to affirm Jesus’ human nature: fully divine nature/substance (homoousios) and fully human nature/substance (homoousios)in one reasonable soul and body, or person. (Roughly)

When it comes to god, there is a conceptual two sides to the coin. In the West, we are instinctually inclined from to think of God as one, general giving chiefest of places to God the Father. While there shouldn’t be chiefest of places among the Trinity of persons, it’s what we do by thinking first of the one God. 

This leads to all kinds of problems, the biggest one being that Western Christians use metaphors for god like Kingship, THE Father (gender required), Judge of all, etc. The Authoritarianism patina pit on god as His human image has led to violence and slaughter throughout the centuries. 

Our local radical protestant Thugs typically have a gutter vision of this authoritarianism such that god is most like a dissatisfied 12 year old in full tantrum and it takes a passive, masochistic Jesus to calm him down. Like a dutiful mom without her own life.

In the East, the story is vastly different leading to a somewhat different historical reality. The leading imagination about god reaches out to the three persons, the Trinity, as the partners in our relationship to god. The three are viewed together as three persons in perfect communion, and it is this intersubjective perfection that constitutes the expressed phenomenon of their sharing the same, completely one, homoousian, nature/being.

Thus, the reflection of the godhead in our lives is an emphasis on community as deriving from communion. That we are all accountable to each other via our participation in the divine nature. Family becomes  dominant metaphor. The Creator crowns the Word as King of Heaven, the church as his bride, Mary, the Mother of God as Queen of Heaven and the Holy Spirit as the energy of love between and among all.

This has its effects on the theology of the human person. The human person should not be seen as established independent and serrated from every other individual, but rather the human person is primarily established independent and ontology of relationships. It is our relational being - our tied-to-ness that develops the human person before our individuality develops.

And, of course, this is intuitively right. The baby has no consciousness of self but does have consciousness of an Other as the source of all action, response, and care. Slowly, eventually, children develop a self awareness (when they know the reflection in the mirror is themselves), and then a self awareness (requiring the achievement of some language), etc.

And for christians it is theologically right. We always depend upon a relationship with the Trinity for being. And inasmuch as divine being is itself a perfectly, absolutely loving communion of the three, so it will be for us in heaven. Perfect, absolute love within common union.