#nicean creed

[occult-research-bibliography]

The Book of Enoch

One of the most important, foundational books of mysticism and ancient wisdom

A human, God himself, and a bunch of actual angels are the main characters. It’s basically a travel journal. Also, God lives in a crystal palace. Who knew?

TW: Below is a bunch of text that thinks it’s a lot funnier and smarter than it actually is. Sorry x

But 1st, some history: The Book of Enoch is written on some of the most important ancient paper surviving today. It is literally one of the scrolls known as THE Dead Sea Scrolls, written down for the first time around 300ish BC -- 300 years literally before Jesus showed up (thus necessitating a New Testament, The Bible Part II, the sequel. God’s biography wasn’t enough anymore because the Son needed one, too.) For at least 700 years, all those clay jars containing content literally, communally, and officially altogether were The Bible Part I.

Until 325 AD, that is, when the Catholic Church decided to unceremoniously and metaphorically chuck the jar with Enoch in it out. It was at the Council of Nicea in 325 that a whole bunch of content from the Bible suddenly became officially not-part-of-the-Bible-anymore. They became (*gasp!*) the Apocrypha.

Imagine the movie. Like a reboot of the Heavenly Cinematic Universe. Foreshadowing and mixed-messaging ensues, predicting a disruption in the force of the canon.

In the distance, at the bottom of a deep canyon, a peaceful little town being burned to the ground by Romans casts flickering firelight against the shadowy cliff walls. From the mouth of a cave high overhead stare out a handful of soot-stained townspeople, while their comrades hide the town’s most greatestest of all treasured mcguffins. (Oddly enough, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a runaway goat. Not kidding.) The townspeople had snuck, soot-stained, out the back of the massacre to save the town’s bible. Though their home was squashed out of existence, their bible survived. And the Book of Enoch was part of that stash of scrolls.

Even better copies of Enoch survived in ancient Greek and Ethiopian bibles — proof that Enoch was actually a worldwide bestseller. And all the content between those three copies was identical. It appears that their bibles all included the Book of Enoch just as surely as they included the whole “Let there be light,” and “here are Ten Commandments that you’re fucked if you don’t follow” bits. For 700 years — at least, considering it was a pre-existing oral tradition long before it was written down. Think Homer, but with one God and wayyyyy more wars. And more characters who begot people. Soooo many people. And claymation monsters. Soooo many monsters.

And then one day, 700ish years later, a bunch of Catholic Church leaders got together and looked at their bible and said, “All these scrolls are included. Except that one over there. That one you can pitch.” Except that there were a few other books they also decided were no longer part of the Really, Really, Really Official Bible. The Book of Enoch had suddenly become apocryphal “Apocrypha.” Just, you know, decided one day. Likely because Enoch’s version of how everything gets apocalypsed in the end doesn’t mention Jesus, which must have been incredibly awkward at dinner parties.

Suddenly, +/- 2,000 years after it was stashed, a modern Bedouin goat shepherd/archaeology discoverer calls somebody to pull a historically and cinematically important-looking collection of clay jars out of a cave. It was The Bible. Except now it’s The Bible Part I plus “a few other books over there that aren’t part of us, no sir, they must have snuck in. They’re not one of us.” And those discoverers would obviously have thought, “Meh. They must just be the Apocrypha. Not part of The Really, Really, Really Official Bible” everybody still believes in nowadays. Enoch had been uninvited, and orphaned, and all on the same day in 325 AD. But how could that one jar of paper know that he’d been disowned? I feel for him.

Worse yet, today, +/- 2,000 years after it was stashed in that cave, we’ve become all superstitious about it. We call the apocrypha “Occult.” (Oh the irony of that label so completely not tracking!) Granted, the world had found it hidden away from uninitiated eyes in a cave like some sorcerer’s spell book. Except that it had sat next to The Bible thinking they were both the same thing, part of the same team, family. For God’s sake, they shared the same DNA. So the fact that it was all snuggled up against The Really Really Really Official Bible Part I jars was kind of an inconvenient truth. Somebody carefully squirreled away the mostest Good book the world has ever known, right next to the mostest Bad books of all time that could apparently fuck it all up for everyone if it was ever discovered? Weird sense of humor, those massacred townspeople.

Note: If you like audiobooks, this narrator is iconic. Seriously. If you’re going to read something epic about fire and brimstone and apocalypses, you want this guy saying all the words. (I thank you, Roger Clark, for bringing it to life!) And when it says, “By R.H. Blahblahblah,” he isn’t claiming to be the author of the Book of Enoch — he’s the translator. Enoch was the author of the Book of Enoch.

[pandabibble]

oh sweet I think I actually came up with a new one on new years, okay so hear me out (not even close to a christian, let alone catholic, and assume some other sect of christianity has already done this at some point):

If we accept that jesus is both divine and mortal in nature, as the nicean creed insists, therefore we must consider whether it's reasonable for a mortal woman such as mary to gestate and carry a divine and infinite entity.

Indeed, the only things capable of carrying a divine entity such as the nicean jesus is the father, who we must therefore hold was pregnant with jesus (or at least with jesus' divine aspect) up to the point of his birth via mary.

I call this heresy: dpreg (deity pregnancy)

Tumblr is like "isn't it weird that Christians never think about this fairly obvious implication of their own theology?", then proceeds to independently re-invent an eight-hundred-year-old heresy that caused three separate wars.

[scleroticstatue]

When someone uses a doctrinal misunderstanding to spread misinformation about your sect but you don't need to bring conflict into your relationship and have no spiritual promptings to fight for it so you're just being the strongest little soldier.

[haemey]

Introducing my hella ambitious fanfic project: Credo

Screw it. I was going to wait with posting and uploading until I got further along, but nah, I'm way too impatient. And with the Ao3 servers back up earlier than expected after maintenance, what better time than the present?

Credo will be a series of Good Omens fanfics for which I treat the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed (aka Credo, Latin for "I believe," variations whereof are an indispensable part of many Christian liturgies) as a series of writing prompts. Most of the fics therein will be short oneshots, with many coming in under 1k words. At least one will be a long, multi-chapter fic (which I will only start uploading once I know I can finish it). For some of them, I will follow the original line from the Credo rather closely, others will be rather... abstract.

There will be silliness and fluff, there will be hurt and angst. There will be both comedy and tragedy. Everything will be sfw, most will be G or T rated. If there is an M rating, it will be because of really dark themes and high pain levels.

The fics will come out as I write them, so they won't be in order. I will arrange them correctly within the series, though. They can be read in any order though, since they will all work as standalones, even though, in my mind at least, they're all set in the same universe and might sometimes give additional context to one another.

Some will be plotty, others will just be character studies or theme explorations.

In other words, there will be something for everyone!

We'll begin with the first two, one for each of our Ineffables:

Credo in unum Deum, patrem omnipotentem (I believe in the one God, the Almighty Father), 711 words, G rated:

An exploration of Aziraphale's relationship with God and Heaven after Season 2. No plot, no set timeline, just thoughts and doubts.

Factorem Coeli et Terrae (The Maker of Heaven and Earth), 569 words, G rated:

Crowley reflecting on Creation. Just that.

I hope you give these a try, come along for the journey, and if you do, please tell me what you think!

Art by me :)

Edit: Ooooh, forgot to tag @goodomensafterdark :D

[andmaybegayer]

my sister in law has not really read any history and is a lifelong Hindu so she doesn't have a lot of context for the Churches. My brother and I started listing variants of Christianity and tried to describe them despite also not knowing that much about Christianity either. It's mostly Catholics here. They have the Pope. You know the priests with the black robes and pointy hats? That's Eastern Orthodox. They have them in Russia and the Balkans and also Greece. There was the Nicean Creed. Which was a big argument about the trinity. Then we had to try and explain the trinity. It was fun.

[physicsgoblin]

I've just asked a dude who messaged me on catholic match why he doesn't agree with the nicean creed. We'll see what he says. In fact I'm going to start asking men why they are going against church teaching when I see it. If I can't get married I will root out heresy

[roses-red-and-pink]

From an LDS perspective, what's the number one problem with Roman Catholicism; likewise, what would you guys see as the number one problem with Protestantism?

Protestantism would be lack of authority. Who gave all these churches authority??

For Catholicism I think it would be the same… but more in a way that the authority was slowly lost, and doctrines became corrupted (ie Marian theology, trinity theory (as understood by the nicean creed), etc… and power struggles amongst popes and bishops clouded the direct line of authority.

And then for orthodox (I know you didn’t ask lol) I think tradition as the basis of authority. I know you tried to explain in the other post but I just don’t see how it’s decided which tradition is right and which is wrong. That’s why the pope in the Catholic Church makes sense to me. And why prophets in the LDS church are important, because to me, God sets up an organized structure to make his will known to the people like Moses or David.

[racefortheironthrone]

So I know my homoiousios vs. homoousios, and my monophysite vs. dyophysite, and my monothelite vs. dyothelite, and how it all led to the Arab caliphates getting a decent navy and winning the Battle of the Masts.

I don't, and I'd love to! (If you feel like it, obviously.) I'm pretty sure the homoiousios one is about, like, the Trinity or something, but beyond that it's all Greek to me.

(At this point, I feel like I owe @apocrypals royalties or something, but I'm getting a weird kick from doing this on Saint Patrick's Day, so let's do this).

I covered the impact of the monophysite vs. dyophysite split and the Battle of the Masts here, so I'll start from the top.

You are quite correct that the homoiousios vs. homoousios split was, like most of the heresies of the early Church, a Cristological controversy over the nature of Christ and the Trinity. This is perhaps better known as the Arian Heresy, and it's arguably the great-granddaddy of all heresies.

The Arian heresy was the subject of the very first Council of the early Church, the Council of Nicea, convoked by Emperor Constantine the Great in order to end all disputes within the Church forever. (Clearly this worked out well.) In part because the Church hadn't really sat down and attempted to establish orthodoxy before, this debate got very heated. Famously, at one point the future Saint Nicholas supposedly punched Presbyter Arius in the face.

What got a room of men devoted to the "Prince of Peace" heated to the point of physical violence was that Arius argued that, while Christ was the son of God and thus clearly divine, because he was created by God the Father and thus came after the Father, he couldn't be of the same essence (homoousios) as the Father, but rather of similar essence (homoiousios). Eustathias of Antioch and Alexander of Alexandria took the opposing position, which got formulated into the Nicean Creed. As this might suggest, Arius lost both the debate and the succeeding vote that followed, as roughly 298 of 300 bishops attending signed onto the Creed. This got very bad for Arius indeed, because Emperor Constantine enforced the new policy by ordering his writings burned, and Arius and two of his supporters were exiled to Illyricum. Game over, right?

But something odd happened: the dispute kept going, as new followers of Arius popped up and showed themselves to be much better at the Byzantine knife-fighting of Church politics. About ten years later, the ever-unpredictable Constantine turned against Athanasius of Alexandria (who had been Alexander's campaign manager, in essence) and banished him for intruiging against Arius, while Arius was allowed to return to the church (this time in Jerusalem) - although this turned out to be mostly a symbolic victory as Arius died on the journey and didn't live to see his readmission.

....and then it turned out that Constantine the Great's son Constantius II was an Arian and he reversed policy completely, adopting the Arian position and exiling anyone who disagreed with him, up to and including Pope Liberius. While the Niceans eventually triumphed during the reign of Theodosius the Great, Arianism unexpectedly became a major geopolitical issue within the Empire.

See, both during their exile and during their brief period of ascendancy within the Church, one of the major projects of the Arians was to send out missionaries into the west to preach their version of Christianity. Unexpectedly, Arianism proved to be a big hit among the formerly pagan Goths (thanks in no small part to the missionary Ulfilas translating the Bible into Gothic), who were perhaps more familiar with pantheons in which patriarchal gods were considered senior to their sons.

While they weren't particularly given to persecuting Niceans in the West, the Ostrogothic, Visigothic, Burgundian, and Vandal Kings weren't about to let themselves be pushed around by some Roman prick in Constantinople either - which added an interesting religious component to Justinian's attempt to reconquer the West.

[bond-villains-are-winning]

The Christians asserting that “Empathy is a Sin” are the same ones who will loudly demand that you “Read your Bible!”

Demonstrating that what they really are saying is “You need to be in Church reading along with the Pastor like reading along with teacher in First Grade.”

Their denomination’s Liturgical staff has done all the cherry picking necessary to avoid reading about empathy in woke Jesus and the Beatitudes, woke Isaiah and the ‘Fasting Acceptable to the Lord’, woke Apostles and the socialist commune set up as the original Church.

So a lot of Christians haven’t been exposed to the woke empathetic parts.

Frankly, most mainstream denominations find there is a lot more money in the collection plate after hellfire-and-damnation readings and sermons than after feeding the indigent readings and sermons.

Afterall, the Christian’s shorting the collection plates after a woke reading are the same Christians shorting the tips for the wait staff at post-services Sunday brunch.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Extra Credit - HISTORY

Never a Short Lesson.

Summary: The Church has been an unempathetic ‘Republican Jesus’ since the end of the Fourth Century.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That original egalitarian communal church organization described in the Acts of the Apostles was divided iby questions about the nature of Jesus: was he a totally human rabbi, prophet, messiah or something greater?

These denominations were..terminated…in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries when the Emperors Constantine I and Theodosis I suborned a couple upper class sects that had merged Neoplatonic ideas to Christian beliefs to concoct Jesus as part of a God-Trinity.

Christian Trinitarianism ( Jesus was…sort of…God ) was given civil authority to convert or terminate any pagans or non-Trinitarian Christians. The Nicean Creed was the official loyalty oath.

Thereafter most Christians persecuted and killed for their Faith were persecuted and killed by other Christians for Heresy. The unempathetic killers having a more correct faith.

A one-man translation by the Pope of Rome’s private Secretary of the Greek language into Latin

At this point the Trinterians began to assemble the Greek language texts into a Bible.

Incidentally, as of 382 CE the phrase “eternal punishment” did not appear in any Hebrew texts, in any Greek language texts that comprise the New Testament, in any of the Nag Hammadi Greek language texts excluded from the Bible, nor in any Greek or Latin writings of the various sects’ theologians and leaders of the Second through Fifth Centuries. Just as ‘eternal punishment’ isn’t mentioned in the Nicean Creed.

‘Eternal punishment’ enters for European Christianity in the one-person unedited translation of the Greek texts into Latin for the Catholic Vulgate Bible.

The two Triniterian sects (Nicean vs Arians) engaged in a couple hundred years of civil war ostensibly about the ‘sort of’ nature of Jesus. This civil war resulted in the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages in Europe.

The eastern Roman Empire continued on often referred to as the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Empire at the same time.

The Churches descendent from those branches of the Byzantine Empire have never embraced a concept of ‘eternal punishment’ because it’s not in any Text.

[nationwidedornermoment]

FUCK THE NICEAN CREED, EAT SHIT AND DIE TRINITARIANS

[ffcrazy15]

I thought that the heresy that person, was the one Saint Nicholas punched Arius for (since someone pointed out that Trinity dogma was established in Nicean synod). And I was like: "Oh, shit, I was talknig the other day about Saint Nick's punch, and now we have Arius 2.0!"

But no, after a short research, it turned out that Arius was more about Jesus not being both a Man and a God, and not about God birthing Jesus etc.

Yup, Arianism was about the hypostatic union, not the nature of the Trinity.

Modalism was condemned by Pope Dionysius under its then-current name "Sabellianism" in Against the Sabellians, AD 262. Trinitarian belief was also explicitly codified in the Nicene Creed at the good old Council of Nicaea in 325.

[wunkmanson-ofhousedickerson]

Mormonism and Jehovahs witnesses because they dont reaffirm the nicean creed and believe a bunch of other nonsense

(These are the more common ones i can name off the top of my head, just curious)

[sandgold]

@internerdionality i hope you don't mind that im replying through a new post. that post had gotten so long its a pain to wrangle lol

yeah ive seen odd depictions of vincent and aldo and i think even with the friction between them in canon would not let themselves act like literal children. i don't think the people who depict them as such do it because they hate aldo. sometimes they simply want to make vincent look good. or make it look like vincent is the hand of god striking down judgement upon the catholic church and aldo simply is the face of the church in this scenario.

you get me about vincent lol. vincent being so blase abt the schism is Odd and tipped me off that the author is not catholic. i mean just the apostles creed/nicean creed that gets recited every week during mass i believe in one holy catholic church pretty much says it all. i am no devout catholic and i know this part of the creed is not exactly about the Roman Catholic Church but a universal church. but again, its quite an odd thing to say and it sounds so haughty. a lot of people in fandom has taken it to mean that vincent does not care if people approve of his beliefs and doesn't mind if they leave the church for this differences when. he is a priest. schism means your flock is leaving your care. it pretty much means souls would leave God and if he is an actual catholic priest he wouldn't want that.

also another thing that makes it odd for vincent to say is because if he believes that christ is not in the church why is he here. it makes me curious about his spiritual journey because when i arrived at the same conclusion back in the day, my response was to go to christian denominations to see where god is exactly.

lawmeli as a seat warmer is interesting but it just sounds so politically savvy for the liberal faction when we all know they're a fractured bunch. also kind of odd they would shift to lawmeli when aldo had a much stronger start. it's like the 18 aldo voters are placating the 5 or so people from the liberal faction who didnt vote for aldo.

i agree that aldo does like getting approval from his peers. it's such a human need but again i separate aldo's sense self worth from his beliefs and i think he wants approval for the causes he fights for more than the approval of him as a person. he's defining characteristic is a cold bloodless intellectual. its more important to him that the causes he believes in gets the support otherwise he knows that when he's gone, the progress he and lhf had made will be undone.

yeah i read the book before the movie so my idea of aldo is much more mellow. though he does have his moments where he bites back but he's not as quick to anger unless he gets really goaded into it

as for adeyemi and how aldo reacted to it, i think he was ready to accept him and sees it as God's will since he did say that god doesn't do recounts. he still believes the hand of god in the conclave. he's much more welcome to the idea in the movie too. iirc he said something about telling the people of milan that it's something to celebrate?

and yeah i think aldo will feel used by lhf. another way he becomes the corpse in the relationship. add that to the fact that lhf was keeping secrets and going against his advice will make him question if lhf ever felt any genuine affection for him.

[the-single-element]

Trinity Sunday

Over the Easter season, we've heard the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection, and then, of his return to his "father", and then, of the coming of the Holy Spirit.

If we find something strange about this, I suspect it'll usually be the miracles themselves, not the cast of characters involved.

But in Jesus's time and place, in the Judah and Galilee of 2000 years ago, to describe how he talked about himself and the Father and the Spirit as "strange" would've been an understatement.

Consider this: what was the most often repeated, most stressed, most belabored point in the Sinai covenant? "No other gods but God."

What is the "greatest commandment", confirmed by Jesus in his final debate in Jerusalem? "Hear, o Israel, the Lᴏʀᴅ is God, the Lᴏʀᴅ is one."

Surrounded by polytheistic cultures, Jewish culture was uncompromising on this point.

And yet Jesus claims, on the one hand, equality with God the Father (“before Abraham came to be”, “the Father and I are one”…), and on the other hand, converses with God the Father (”I know you always listen to me”, “into your hands I commend my spirit”…) and talks of the Spirit as something that can only arrive if he's steps back to make room for it.

How can we resolve this apparent contradiction? How can Jesus be divine, and distinguishable from the Father… and how can the Holy Spirit be divine, and distinguishable from both of them… and have them all still count as being "one", a monotheistic God?

We can start by digging into the notes and conclusions of the early Christian communities, who had to solve this riddle first.

In the fourth century AD, Church leaders from across the whole "known world" met twice to debate certain points of doctrine: once in Nicaea in 325, then again in Constantinople in 381.

One of the products of their debate was a document we now call the "Nicean Creed", a summary of what everyone (other than a few Arian holdouts) had been willing to agree about, with regard to the contentious doctrinal issues of the time. And on the topic of the mysterious, seemingly impossible relationship we now call the "Trinity", it had this to say":

Jesus was “begotten, not made” – not a creation of God the Father, but rather, naturally following from his existence. This happened before anything else was created – “before all ages“.

Jesus and the Father are “consubstantial” – sharing one substance.

The Holy Spirit “proceeds” (with connotations of origination) from the Father – again, logically following from his existence.

So the Son and Spirit’s existence, in some way, is a natural consequence of the Father’s existence.

This… doesn't do much to clarify things, does it?

But it becomes more enlightening when we make use of another mysterious fact we know about God, which we discussed at Easter: God is love. "Love" in the peculiar sense that we use the word when talking about the Kingdom, yes. But love.

And that kind of love can't exist alone.

Every example we're given in the Good News of the kind of love which defines God and God's Kingdom is a relationship with the other.

So the Trinity – the idea that God can be Father, Son, and Spirit while still being "one" – far from being a paradox, a doctrine invented to patch up a logical contradiction in the Good News… is, instead, almost a logical necessity if God is who we believe him to be.

What else could God be, to know love before Heaven and Earth were made? What else could God be, than either intrinsically in a relationship, or (if you parse it differently) intrinsically a relationship himself?

We can take this line of reasoning further. Consider what it means that the Father and the Son are not just distinguishable, but different. Different enough to have different preferences, different perspectives (as we saw, painfully, in Gethsemane). God’s love, the relationship of love that God embodies, is not the mere love of one's own close compatriots or kin, but the love for someone that has distinctions from you.

And so what does this mean for us? If God has always known what it is like to love and be loved, if the particular love between all three distinct divine persons is part of who God is… what lesson can we draw from it?

If that’s part of who he is…

…and if we’re made in his image…

…then he wants us to know that kind of love too.

Love for each other. Love for those different from ourselves, which nonetheless unites us. Love like the Spirit enabled at Pentecost, when everyone heard the good news in their own native tongue. Love like Jesus had for the Caananite woman. Distinction without disunity.

Best wishes to you and yours.

[orthodoxydaily]

SAINTS&READING: THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2025

january 10_january23

St GREGORY OF NYSSA (395)

Saint Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, was a younger brother of Saint Basil the Great (January 1). His birth and upbringing came at a time when the Arian disputes were at their height. Having received an excellent education, he was at one time a teacher of rhetoric. In the year 372, he was consecrated by Saint Basil the Great as bishop of the city of Nyssa in Cappadocia.

Saint Gregory was an ardent advocate for Orthodoxy, and he fought against the Arian heresy with his brother Saint Basil. Gregory was persecuted by the Arians, by whom he was falsely accused of improper use of church property, and thereby deprived of his See and sent to Ancyra.

In the following year Saint Gregory was again deposed in absentia by a council of Arian bishops, but he continued to encourage his flock in Orthodoxy, wandering about from place to place. After the death of the emperor Valens (378), Saint Gregory was restored to his cathedra and was joyously received by his flock. His brother Saint Basil the Great died in 379.

Only with difficulty did Saint Gregory survive the loss of his brother and guide. He delivered a funeral oration for him, and completed Saint Basil’s study of the six days of Creation, the Hexaemeron. That same year Saint Gregory participated in the Council of Antioch against heretics who refused to recognize the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God. Others at the opposite extreme, who worshipped the Mother of God as being God Herself, were also denounced by the Council. He visited the churches of Arabia and Palestine, which were infected with the Arian heresy, to assert the Orthodox teaching about the Most Holy Theotokos. On his return journey Saint Gregory visited Jerusalem and the Holy Places.

In the year 381 Saint Gregory was one of the chief figures of the Second Ecumenical Council, convened at Constantinople against the heresy of Macedonius, who incorrectly taught about the Holy Spirit. At this Council, on the initiative of Saint Gregory, the Nicean Symbol of Faith (the Creed) was completed.

Together with the other bishops Saint Gregory affirmed Saint Gregory the Theologian as Archpastor of Constantinople.

In the year 383, Saint Gregory of Nyssa participated in a Council at Constantinople, where he preached a sermon on the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit. In 386, he was again at Constantinople, and he was asked to speak the funeral oration in memory of the empress Placilla. Again in 394 Saint Gregory was present in Constantinople at a local Council, convened to resolve church matters in Arabia.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa was a fiery defender of Orthodox dogmas and a zealous teacher of his flock, a kind and compassionate father to his spiritual children, and their intercessor before the courts. He was distinguished by his magnanimity, patience and love of peace.

Having reached old age, Saint Gregory of Nyssa died soon after the Council of Constantinople. With his great contemporaries, Saints Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, Saint Gregory of Nyssa significantly influenced the Church life of his time. His sister, Saint Macrina, wrote: “You are renowned both in the cities, and gatherings of people, and throughout entire districts. Churches ask you for help.” Saint Gregory is known in history as one of the most profound Christian thinkers of the fourth century. Endowed with philosophical talent, he saw philosophy as a means for a deeper penetration into the authentic meaning of divine revelation.

Saint Gregory left behind many remarkable works of dogmatic character, as well as sermons and discourses. He has been called “the Father of Fathers.”

VENERABLE ANTIPAS OF VALAAM MONASTERY. (1882)

Saint Antipas was born in Moldavia, Romania in 1816. His father was a deacon in the village church, and his mother ended her life in a women’s monastery as a schemanun.

Saint Antipas came to Valaam Monastery from Mt Athos on November 6, 1865. He spent the rest of his life in the skete at Valaam, living like a hermit.

Blessed with the gift of clairvoyance, Saint Antipas fell asleep in the Lord on January 10, 1882.

Source: Orrthodox Church in America_OCA

James 1:19-27

19 So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; 20 for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. 21 Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which can save your souls. 22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. 26 If anyone among you thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one's religion is useless. 27 Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

John 10:9-16

9 I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. 11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. 12 But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. 13 The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own. 15 As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.

[mcgravin]

Arius is the Reason for the Nicean (Creed).

Imo, christians would have an easier time with the trinity if they described it as like, “my god has three faces” or “jesus is the feet on the earth, the spirit the hands, and god the head” instead of restating polytheism verbatim

We should have a gathering in a place called Nicaea and have this discussion with the various Church leaders, cause I think you're on to something