​Two recent articles in the American journal of opinion First Things remind us that the Church’s struggle against heresy, begun with the councils, is never ending. In both cases the heresy arises not from a conscious wish to resurrect an ancient error but from woeful and all too widespread ignorance of the Christian tradition, and from the understandable desire to find something that fits our earthly sense of what is right.

​The first concerns the error associated with the name of Marcion, a preacher active in Rome in the middle of the second century, who found the Old Testament to be unacceptable because of its harsh and rigid rules. It was to be rejected, replaced by the New Testament message of love and salvation through faith alone.

Wesley Hill published a First Things Web Exclusive on 11 May 2018 entitled ‘Andy Stanley’s Modern Marcionism.’ Andy Stanley is the pastor of North Point Community Church, a ‘non-denominational’ Evangelical megachurch in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He recently preached a sermon to his church’s congregation of thousands on the passage in Acts 15 where the assembly of the apostles and elders in Jerusalem, meeting to decide what observances should be required of gentile converts, declared, ‘that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: but that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood’ (verses 19–20).

​The conclusion the pastor drew from this, as quoted by Wesley Hill, was that the ‘Church leaders unhitched the church from the worldview, value system, and regulations of Jewish scriptures.’ The gospel ‘is completely detached … from everything that came before.’ With the Incarnation, ‘God’s arrangement with Israel should now be eliminated from the equation.’

​‘Jesus’s new covenant … can stand on its own two nail-scarred resurrection feet. It does not need propping up by the Jewish scriptures.
‘It’s liberating for men and woman who are drawn to the simple message that God loves you so much He sent His Son to pave the way to a relationship with you.
‘And it’s liberating for people who find it virtually impossible to embrace the dynamic, the worldview, and the values system depicted in the story of Ancient Israel.’

​This may be comforting to some but the problem with it is the same as with Marcion’s rejection of the ‘Jewish scriptures’—it is a rejection of the Christian faith, because that faith is that the New Testament is not the abolition of the Old Testament but its fulfilment. Contrary to the teaching of Marcion, the God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old, declaring the same message to mankind in both. To reject the Old Testament must inevitably lead to misinterpretation of the New, in Pastor Stanley’s case to the teaching that the worldview and value system of the New Testament are not the same as those of the Old.
(Some of the quotations above appear in an article by Michael Gryboski in the Christian Post of 9 May 2018, accessed on line.)

​The second article concerns the gnostic heresy, the radical dualism that holds matter to be inherently evil and spirit alone to be good. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, gnosticism remains Christianity’s most insidious enemy, as the writings of Elaine Pagels, Bart D. Ehrman, Karen L. King and Tom Harpur show.

Abigail Rine Favale published ‘Evangelical Gnosticism,’ in the May 2018 issue of First Things. She teaches in a great books program at an Evangelical university, most of her students being ‘born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety.’ (p. 13) In the course of her teaching, she discovered that, when it came to the resurrection of the dead, barely a quarter of her students held the orthodox belief that we will ‘have a body in our glorified, heavenly form.’ (p. 14) The majority associated the body with sin, a fetter on the soul, and saw it as only natural that we would be disembodied souls in heaven.

​As Favale points out, the resurrection of the body is not a peripheral doctrinal issue, it is at the very centre of the Christian conception of salvation. For the Christian, the body is not an accidental appendage of the soul, we as human beings in the image and likeness of God are an indissoluble union of body and soul. This is why the Word was made flesh (John 1:13), so that we might be saved, body and soul as one.

​She refers us to Book XIV of St Augustine’s City of God, where this issue is dealt with in detail. I am grateful to her for this reference, as I was culpably ignorant of the fundamental point that St Augustine makes there.

​St Augustine provides an exegesis of St Paul’s well-known passage in Galatians 5:19-21:

​‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’

​St Augustine says in Chapter 2 of Book XIV:

​‘… in the works of the flesh, which he said were plain to see and which he enumerated and condemned, we find not only those that involve carnal pleasure, like fornication, impurity, licentiousness or carousing, but also those that display mental defects which have nothing to do with carnal pleasure. In the case of idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, dissension, party spirit and envy, surely no one doubts that we have here defects of the mind rather than of the body. For it may happen that a person abstains from bodily pleasures because he worships idols or follows the mistaken doctrine of some sect; and yet even so, though such a person appears to check and curb his carnal desires, he stands convicted, on this same authority of the apostle, of living according to the flesh. In this case, his very abstention from pleasures of the flesh proves that he is engaged in the damnable works of the flesh.’

​In other words, St Paul is contrasting, not the sinful body with the stainless soul, but a way of life separated from God, the life of the flesh, with a way of life united to God, the life of the spirit. Further, as St Augustine points out in Chapter 3 of the book, contrary to the doctrines of Plato and Manichæus, the body is not a fetter on the soul, but rather the corruption of the body is due to the sinfulness of the soul.

​St Augustine sums up in Chapter 5: 

​‘In the case of our sins and vices then we should not do an injustice to our creator by blaming the nature of the flesh, which is good in its own kind and order. But if a person abandons the good creator to live according to some created good, it is not good, whether he chooses to live according to the flesh or according to the soul or according to the whole man … For when anyone approves the substance of the soul as the highest good and denounces the substance of the flesh as an evil, surely he is carnal both in his pursuit of the soul and in his avoidance of the flesh inasmuch as it is through human vanity and not divine truth that he holds this view.’
(Loeb Classical Library, trans. Philip Levine, IV, pp. 265–283.)

​Today the Church commemorates St Constantine, who established the Peace of the Church and summoned the First Œcumenical Council in A.D. 325, and his mother St Helen, who discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem and founded Christianity’s most holy shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

May all the Constantines and Helens who celebrate their name-day today enjoy a joyful and blessed feast! A very special χρόνια πολλά for our niece Helena.

​Today the Church commemorates the Holy Fathers of the first six œcumenical councils: the Council of Nicæa, A.D. 325; the 1st Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381; the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431; the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451; the 2nd Council of Constantinople, A.D. 553; and the 3rd Council of Constantinople, A.D. 680–81.

​This feast is always celebrated on the Sunday nearest 16 July, i.e., falling on the 13th to the 19th inclusive.

​Despite the anathematizing of the monophysite heresy by the Council of Chalcedon, the Church continued to be racked by controversy until the reign of the Emperor Justin I (518–527). The feast began as the Synaxis of the Council of Chalcedon on 16 July 518, when the Council of Chalcedon was at last restored to the diptychs. The Sunday nearest it was later celebrated as the feast of the first six councils on the recommendation of St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809), whose feast falls on 14 July.

​The readings in the Liturgy this Sunday are appropriate.

​The Epistle is St Paul’s words to Titus, first bishop of Crete: ‘This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men. But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain. A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself …’ (Titus 3: 8–15 in part).

​The Gospel is our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matthew 5: 14–19)

​Today we remember our father among the saints Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople. He presided over the Fourth Œcumenical Council at Chalcedon in A.D. 451.

​The Council of Chalcedon, famous for providing the dogmatic formula relating the human nature to the divine in Our Lord Jesus Christ, was summoned by the Empress Pulcheria and the Emperor Marcian to address the Eutychean heresy. This is part of the tangled story of the events unfolding since the Third Œcumenical Council held at Ephesus two decades earlier, and going back even to the First Œcumenical Council more than a century before. I will recount these events very briefly.

​The Nicene Creed, promulgated by the First Œcumenical Council in the year 325, affirmed the divinity of Christ, recognising him to be:

​While the Creed clarified the divinity of Christ, it left open how the human and the divine were joined in the incarnation. It soon became clear that there were differences of opinion. Everyone accepted the Nicene definition, more particularly that the purpose of the incarnation was ‘for our salvation.’ But it seemed that the interpretation of the incarnation by some theologians undermined the possibility of salvation. What made the question more difficult was the universal assumption of divine impassibility—that nothing can happen to God, making all the things that happened to Jesus an issue.

​The problem came to be thought of in terms of the difference in theological emphasis between theologians associated with Antioch—Aristotelian, literal and historical—and Alexandria—Platonic, allegorical and mystical. The Antiochene emphasis on historicity caused them to focus on the humanity of Jesus, linking it only loosely to his divinity, while the Alexandrian emphasis on the mystical caused them to focus on the divinity of Christ, joining his humanity so closely to it as to be virtually indistinguishable, the so-called hypostatic union. For the Antiochenes, salvation equalled immortality. Because the humanity in Christ died and rose again, Christ can confer the gift of immortality on human beings. For the Alexandrians, salvation equalled divinization, and therefore requires the operation of a Christ in whom the human and the divine are inseparably united in hypostatic union, and who suffered, died and rose as a single being.

​Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had studied in Antioch with St John Chrysostom, and who in A.D. 392 became bishop of Mopsuestia, a town in Cilicia II, in what is now southern Turkey, taught the Antiochene christology. Nestorius, who had been his student in Antioch, held a more extreme version of the teaching, to the point where he objected to any identification of the Only-Begotten, the Logos, with the man Christ Jesus, and hence objected to the Blessed Virgin Mary’s title Theotokos (‘bearer of God’). He held that she deserved only the title of Christotokos, since she bore only the human person in Christ, not the divine. The incarnation occurred when the human Jesus was assumed by the eternal Logos. The Alexandrian theology, by contrast, was that the union of the human and divine in Christ was so complete that the attributes of one could be assigned to the other without blasphemy and the Virgin Mary is literally Theotokos.

​The Emperor Theodosius II was favourable to the Antiochene view while his sister the Augusta Pulcheria held to the Alexandrian. Theodosius placed Nestorius on the patriarchal throne of Constantinople in 428. Proclus, who would later become Patriarch of Constantinople and be canonised as a saint, preached a sermon before him immediately after his elevation criticising his christology. St Cyril of Alexandria took up the debate, defending the Alexandrian doctrine of the hypostatic union, as did St John Cassian in Rome, who saw a resemblance of Nestorius’s teaching to the Pelagian heresy in the West.

​To resolve the issue, Theodosius summoned the Third Œcumenical Council to meet in Ephesus in Asia (now in western Turkey) in June of 431, expecting it to vindicate Nestorius and condemn St Cyril. St Cyril, however, arrived there before any of the Syrian bishops, who would naturally side with Nestorius. With the support of the orthodox bishop of Ephesus, Mennon, he opened the council without waiting for them so that, instead of himself, it was Nestorius’s teachings that were condemned and Nestorius who was deposed.

​The teachings that were condemened at Ephesus flowed from a fundamental distinction Nestorius made between the incarnate Christ and the eternal Logos, the Only-Begotten. Against John 1:14, ‘And the Word became flesh,’ he taught that the flesh of Christ was not the flesh of the Logos. He held that the passages of Scripture that describe the human activities of Jesus are to be ascribed to Christ and those that describe the divine actions to the Logos, but no passage is to be ascribed to both. He held that Christ’s divine acts were not his own but were the operation of the Logos through him, so that it is proper to call him Theophorus, ‘bearer of God,’ but not God, hence worship is paid to the incarnate Christ only by courtesy, not by right. And finally, he taught that the person who ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father and who will judge the living and the dead is the incarnate Christ but not the eternal Son of God.

​Understandably, when John of Antioch and the other Syrian bishops arrived in Ephesus, they were furious and immediately held a counter-council that claimed to depose St Cyril and Mennon. But they were too late. Theodosius, although unhappy with the turn of events, accepted the deposition of Nestorius and the condemnation of his teachings.

​There now occurred an event to confuse the debate further. Eutyches, abbot of a monastery in Constantinople and influential at court because of his friendship with the prime minister Chrysaphius, espoused a doctrine radically opposed to that of Nestorius. Instead of distinguishing the human and the divine in the incarnate Christ, he collapsed them in almost a parody of the hypostatic union, asserting that at the incarnation the humanity from the Theotokos and the divinity from the Logos ceased to be two natures and became one, so that the humanity of the incarnate Christ is not consubstantial with that of human beings.

​St Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople in succession to Nestorius, held a local synod in 448 that condemned Eutyches’ heretical views but Eutyches made use of his influence at court to arrange a packed synod to rehear his case, the notorious ‘Robber Synod’ held at Ephesus in 449. This predictably cleared him and condemned St Flavian. The synod degenerated into a riot in which St Flavian was so severely injured that he died shortly after.

​Anatolius now enters the stage. He was an Alexandrian and was ordained a deacon by St Cyril. When the Robber Synod took place, he was living in Constantinople as representative to the imperial court of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Dioscorus, who had succeeded St Cyril when the latter died in 444. Dioscorus had presided over the Robber Synod and favoured Eutyches’ doctrines. When St Flavian was assassinated, Dioscorus used his influence to have Anatolius made Patriarch of Constantinople, thinking he could easily control him, but St Anatolius turned out to be fervently orthodox, although he could do nothing as long as Chrysaphius was in power.

​In the meantime, St Leo of Rome, reacting to the teachings of Nestorius and Eutyches, wrote his ‘Letter to Flavian,’ better known as the Tome of Leo, based on St John Cassian’s ‘The Incarnation,’ defending the orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ. The letter is dated 13 June 449.

​On 28 July 450, Theodosius died and his sister the Augusta Pulcheria became regent. Her first act was to dismiss Chrysaphius. She had the relics of St Flavian brought back to Constantinople for interment in the Church of the Holy Apostles.

​At the request of St Anatolius, Pulcheria and Marcian summoned the Fourth Œcumenical Council to meet in Chalcedon, a city on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople, in October 451. The council read and approved the Tome of Leo, and condemned the teachings of Eutyches and Dioscorus, who were exiled, the latter deposed, as well as the opposite teachings of Nestorius. The council, avoiding both the separation of the natures of Christ and their confusion, defined the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ as:

​(Schaff and Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, XIV, 1900, pp. 264–65.

​This definition has been accepted by all the orthodox, East and West, ever since. However, some of the bishops of Syria and Egypt, loyal to what they believed to be the teaching of St Cyril, rejected the Chalcedonian dogma. In 457, St Proterius, who succeeded Dioscorus as Patriarch of Alexandria, was lynched by a mob, who placed on the patriarchal throne the monophysite Timothy ‘the Cat,’ beginning the tragic schism between the orthodox (dyophysites) and the monophysites, which persists to this day.

​St Anatolius was perfected on 3 July 458 and was succeeded on the patriarchal throne of Constantinople by St Gennadius.

​Today is the feast of our father among the saints Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch, A.D. 360–81, for whom see my blog entry for this day in 2014.

​His kontakion is:

​‘The apostate Macedonius fled in fear before your spiritual courage, but we your servants run to you to gain your intercession. Father Meletius, converser with the angels and fiery sword of Christ our God, we praise you as a star bringing light to all.’

​Macedonius was a semi-Arian who was Partriarch of Constantinople in 342–46 and 351–60. He died c. 364. His followers formed a sect known as the Pneumatomachi, ‘fighters against the Spirit,’ who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This heresy was condemned at the 2nd Œcumenical Council held in Constantinople in 381, over whose opening St Meletius presided, and the words ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets’ were added to the basic ‘we believe in the Holy Spirit’ of the Creed of the 1st Œcumenical Council held at Nicæa.

​The church of Alexandria was known as the lighthouse of Orthodoxy because of her two great theologian patriarchs, St Athanasius and St Cyril.

​Cyril, born about A.D. 360, was placed under the protection of his uncle, Theophilus, who gave him a thorough sacred and secular education. Theophilus became Patriarch of Alexandria in 385 and Cyril was ordained into the clergy. He accompanied his uncle to Constantinople for the infamous Synod of Oak in 403, which unjustly convicted St John Chrysostom of heresy. Cyril, when he became Patriarch of Alexandria on his uncle’s death in 412, for a time refused to include St John’s name in the diptychs out of devotion to his uncle’s memory but was reconciled by a vision in which the Mother of God appeared accompanied by the saint.

​As Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril attempted to see that justice was done but had to contend with an unruly population, where Christian, Jewish and pagan mobs were all too often in conflict. Especially disgraceful was the murder of the pagan philosopher Hypatia by a party of fanatical monks.

​In 428, the Emperor Theodosius II summoned the priest and preacher Nestorius from Antioch to become Patriarch of Constantinople. Nestorius claimed to be a champion of orthodoxy but asserted a more extreme form of the Antiochene tendency to distinguish the divine and human natures of Christ to the point where their unity could no longer be confessed. As a corollary of this, he asserted that the Virgin Mary was the mother only of the human nature of Jesus, not of the divine nature, and so was not the literal Theotokos but only figuratively.

​When he learned of this, Cyril declared in his Paschal Homily of 429 that the Virgin had given birth through the Holy Spirit to the Son of God in the flesh and so was in fact, not by mere courtesy, the Theotokos. He wrote to the emperor and to Pope Celestine of Rome. In 430, a council in Rome condemned Nestorius’s errors.

​But Nestorius made use of his influence with the emperor to persecute those he opposed. He persuaded Theodosius to summon a council at Ephesus at Pentecost in 431 to try St Cyril, whom he accused of the Apollinarian heresy, a version of monarchianism. However, instead of finding Cyril guilty of heresy, the assembled fathers of the 3rd Œcumenical Council found Nestorius guilty and reaffirmed the title of Theotokos. Nestorius was deposed and exiled to Libya, where he died around the year 452.

​St Cyril devoted the years until his falling asleep in 444 to healing the divisions in the church, striving to reconcile the bishops who followed the Antiochene tradition to the orthodox confession of the two natures and one person in Christ, a confession that would be confirmed finally by the 4th Œcumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451.

​Today is the feast of St Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople and Confessor. He was born in Constantinople around A.D. 758 during the iconoclast controversy. His father was a high government official who was exiled for his orthodoxy on the veneration of icons. Nicephorus received a good education, both Christian and secular, and became a secretary to the Emperor Constantine, still a child, and his mother the regent Empress Irene. He was imperial representative at the 7th Œcumenical Council at Nicæa in 787.

​When that Council restored the veneration of icons, Nicephorus, considering his task in the world to have been accomplished, retired to a monastery that he had founded at Agathou on the Bosphorus.

​St Tarasius, the Patriarch of Constantinople who had guided the Church through the 7th Œcumenical Council, was so impressed by Nicephorus’s piety, learning and strength of character, that he recommended him as his successor even though Nicephorus was still a layman. The clergy of Constantinople responded with enthusiasm and Nicephorus was enthroned on Great and Holy Pascha, 12 April 806, after being ordained successively to each of the clerical orders.

​When the Emperor Leo the Armenian reignited the iconoclast persecution in 814, St Nicephorus protested. Despite his eloquent defence of the veneration of icons, he was exiled to the monastery at Agathou, then to the even more remote monastery of St Theodore. He continued to write in defence of the veneration of icons until his death on 2 June 829, keeping up the spirits of the orthodox.

​When the Empress Theodora restored the veneration of icons in 843, as a witness to the Triumph of Orthodoxy the saint’s relics were brought back to Constantinople with great pomp and placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Today is the feast of St Eustathius, Patriarch of Antioch. A champion of the struggle against Arianism, he was born c. A.D. 270, became bishop of Berœa (now Aleppo in Syria) c. 320. He took an active part in the  1st Œcumenical Council in 325, combatting the Arian heresy, and was elevated to the see of Antioch by the Fathers of the Council. The Arians, however, forced him out of his see in 331, accusing him of Sabellianism and adultery, and the Emperor Constantine exiled him to Trajanopolis in Thrace, where he died in 337.

​The refusal of his supporters to recognise the election of St Meletius (feast on 12 February) to the see of Antioch in 360 because of the participation of Arians in his election gave rise to the Meletian Schism in Antioch, which was not healed until 485 and which hindered the struggle against Arianism for a century.

Having just completed the page on the Montanist heresy of the 2nd century, I cannot help noticing that the Montanist temptation is all too present in our own day. Instead, however, of the extraordinary activity of the Holy Spirit being invoked by those who feel the Church has become too lax, it is invoked by those who feel it continues to be too strict. It has become a commonplace for those who wish to change the teachings of the Church in ways that contradict the tradition of the Church to claim the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, or the prophetic charisma of Pentecost. I will cite only a few examples; anyone following the religious news will be aware of many others.

1. The Roman Catholic priest and moral theologian Charles E. Curran, an exponent of ‘the new moral theology’ of the 1960s, is one of the Roman Catholic theologians who led the opposition to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanæ vitæ and one of those who rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine that homosexuality is contrary to natural law and intrinsically disordered.

In 1975, he published a rebuttal to charges by Fr Thomas Dubay that the new moral theology had three objectionable features: its frequent dissent from the teaching of the Magisterium, its setting itself up as an alternative magisterium, and its claim to a prophetic voice. Without ever quite denying Fr Dubay’s charges, part of his defence was that ‘One could make a very strong case on the basis of the prophetic function of the theologian for the fact that at times the theologian will have to stand up and disagree with authentic, noninfallible teaching. There can be no doubt that at times in the Old Testament the prophets did speak against what was proposed by the constituted religious authorities. The Constitution of the Church explicitly recognizes the existence of the prophetic office in the Church as separate from the hierarchical teaching office, thus indicating the existence of a possible friction between the prophet and the hierarchical teaching office … one cannot deny that at times the theologian as prophet must speak in a way contrary to that proposed by the teaching office. The theologian should never do this lightly but must try to discern what God is truly asking of us.’ (Charles E. Curran, Ongoing Revision in Moral Theology (1975), p. 59.)

​In 1986, the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, suspended his right to teach Roman Catholic theology. He continued to teach theology just as he had before, but was no longer able to claim that it was Catholic.

2. In 2004, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada referred to the Primate’s Theological Commission the question whether the blessing of committed same-sex unions is a matter of doctrine. This led to the submission in the following year of The St Michael Report, whose conclusions are of less interest than the principle it expresses that ‘Our church today has been challenged to be open to the possibility that the blessing of same-sex unions is consistent with the teaching of Scripture and the development of the Church’s tradition. What is required of the Church is to discern the leading of the Spirit in this matter in reasoned and faithful dialogue with Scripture and tradition, and then to respond in love and obedience.’ (Anglican Church of Canada, Report on the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions (2005), p. 13) … As if the Spirit had not been leading for the past two thousand years in Scripture and tradition as always and everywhere received by Christians.

3. Dr Jack Rogers, a minister and one-time Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and emeritus professor of theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, underwent a conversion to inclusivism of ‘people who are LGBT’ in the Presbyerian Church (U.S.A.), including affirmation of their conduct, and wrote a tract to champion it, Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the  Church (2006). He set out on a tour to promote the book, reported on his website: ‘… perhaps the highlight was October 11 at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. … The event was to take place in an historic Baptist church where Martin Luther King, Jr. reportedly had preached. … By the time the event started, an estimated 125 people had crowded into the room … The atmosphere was electric … Then I gave my remarks and the crowd really seemed to get it. Afterwards they asked really thoughtful questions and showed a real commitment to understanding the issues. I came away from the event feeling that the Holy Spirit was at work.’

4. And now in 2015, the Episcopal Church U.S.A. at its 78th General Convention has endorsed same-sex marriage. George Conger on the Anglican Ink website on 29 June described the scene leading up to the vote, including a conversation with the Rt. Rev. Pierre Whalon, Suffragan Bishop in Europe. ‘‘God has given us a new revelation not shared with our forefathers in the church,’ the bishop said. ‘As such, we must proceed slowly and with generosity of spirit,’ to ensure that the revelation given to the majority was not in error.’

This elicited a startled response on the Creedal Christian blog, which goes on to ask the questions which led St Irenæus to formulate the criteria of apostolic continuity:
‘Regardless of where one stands on this matter, this is a striking statement to make.
‘ ‘A new revelation not shared with our forefathers.’  
‘In other words, God has given The Episcopal Church a revelation that cannot be found in Scripture or Tradition, a revelation that Jesus, St. Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers, the Church Fathers, the Reformers, the Anglican Divines, etc., did not have access to. Because only in our time has God been gracious enough to share it. And God has given this new revelation only to a select few among all the Christians currently living in the world.
‘But how do we know this is truly revelation from God? By what authority and what criteria does a claim to new revelation get checked out and determined to be true or false?’

Today the Church keeps the feast of the Holy God-bearing Fathers of the first six œcumenical councils. See the blog entry for 15 July 2012 for an account of this feast. Since the 1st Œcumenical Council, the Council of Nicæa, is included in this feast, I would like to revisit an earlier blog entry, ‘Nicæa the Movie,’ 15 January 2014. There I noted that a movie on the Council of Nicæa was in production.

Randy Engel interviewed the movie’s promoter, Charles Parlato, on the Renew America website on 6 February 2014. Parlato said that he planned Nicæa as a response to the 2006 movie made of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. ‘If Hollywood has its way, Dan Brown’s version of the history of the Council of Nicaea will prevail unless it is contested on the same battlefield, that is, the battlefield of the popular cinema.’ The version of history that he is referring to is the allegation, now almost mainstream, that ‘the Emperor Constantine, by his machinations and strong-arming, made [the man] Jesus God on earth.’

Parlato shows that he is orthodox on the Trinity: ‘The Council of Nicaea strongly reaffirmed this central teaching that Jesus Christ is both God and man, that he possesses both a divine and a human nature. It was the bishops at the Council, gathered from the four corners of the Empire, who reaffirmed this doctrine. Constantine had nothing to do with it.’

He hoped to emulate another movie, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ (2004), which was very controversial, very popular and made lots of money, but he came face to face with the Hollywood system, which sees movies strictly in terms of how much profit they make and did not think the Council of Nicæa had the same box-office appeal as Jesus being crucified. As a businessman, he came up with a solution to his financial problem: he set up a ‘new fundraising concept called Investors4Charity (I4C)’, in which donors could make an investment on line and specify their favourite charity, to which their share of the profits, if any, would flow.

That was all happening a year and more ago. Since then, the production seems to have sunk below the horizon. It got as far as casting one role: ‘a wonderful character actor for one of the important supporting roles although I cannot as yet reveal his name.’ It would be interesting to know what the ‘important supporting role’ was—could it possibly be Arius?—but we are unlikely ever to learn. Jamil Dehlavi, who was to have directed Nicæa, was interviewed by Hasan Zaidi on the Dawn website on 25 July 2014 and made no mention of the project. By now the I4C website is closed and the the domain name nicaeathemovie.com has expired and not been renewed.

Perhaps it’s all for the best. Somehow I doubt that the movies are a suitable medium for theology. An example is Peter Jackson’s film of The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), which replaced Tolkien’s profoundly Christian vision with a purely pagan one, probably inevitably. In any case, The Da Vinci Code does not claim to be more than fiction. It makes an appeal to the perennial fascination with conspiracy theories and caters to the popular gnostic taste of the moment but hardly amounts to something worth historical or theological debate.