Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 50
Murder in the Name of Allah liberty is not evolutionary or lineal - it is a cyclical phenomenon. . Whenever one of God's prophets or a religious reformer appears, he is opposed. He is accused of dividing the community and breaking traditional conformity. He is pilloried as an apostate. Ultimately a prophet always succeeds in establishing religious freedom. The true faith spread by this religious freedom is hardened in rigid dogma, which actually results in the loss of the right to dissent. . On his last visit to the Temple, Christas said: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. ' (Mark 12:17) This very clear statement separates religious belief from political authority. However, within a year of obtaining political authority (312), the Christian Church was torn by schism. For more than 300 years. Christians had been persecuted and flourished, and yet, soon after Constantine's conversion, the Church was confronted with monastic secession, Donatist schism and Arian heresy. Throughout the history of the. Christian Church, heresy, or deviation from orthodoxy, has been a matter of deep concern. It invariably involves the very concept of deity, the divinity of Christas. . If Christ was divine in an absolute sense, yet distinct from God, there were two Gods and Christianity was a form of ditheism, not monotheism. . On the other hand, if the filial relationship were literally interpreted, then. God the Father would be the progenitor of God the Son. But the logic of this relationship meant that Christ would not be fully God, since there must have been a time when he ‘was not' and God the Father alone existed. 4. Orthodox Christians held Christ as to be identical in being (homousinous) to God the Father, while Arius (c. 256-336) considered him only similar in being (homoiousios) to Him. Then there was the question of his mother. Nestorious (died c. 451) declared that Jesus as was two distinct persons, one human, one divine; and that Marys was the mother only of the human, not the divine Christ. It would be better, therefore, to call her the mother of Christas. The orthodox doctrine is that Maryas is the true mother, not of the Godhead itself, but of the incarnate legos, or Word of. God, containing both the divine and the human natures of Christas 5. The first ecumenical Council of the Church met in 325 in Bithynian. Nicea and issued a creed on the mystery of the Trinity. The unrepentant. Arius was anathamatised by the council and exiled by Emperor Constantine. The emperor also ordered that all Arius's books should be burned and their possession should be punished by death. . The cycle of religious liberty which began with Jesus of Nazarethas 50