Labarum post; excerpts selected by Ellopos Blog:
There have been numerous attempts to recreate a revisionist history of the Church (e.g., “Baptist Successionism”) revolving around some sort of conspiracy of the Church of history to suppress the church that exists only in their imagination. Since Jesus was a Jew, they suppose that Christianity must have been very much like Judaism as we know it and thus they believe that by restoring some supposed Jewish roots, they will finally have the trump card on Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and other Christians who trace their roots further back than the American frontier.
Even a cursory websearch among websites labeling themselves as Messianic or “Hebrew Roots” (essentially fundamentalists using faux Jewishness to lend themselves an air of legitimacy) will quickly come across troubling doctrinal developments. These range from the revival of ancient heresies to well-intentioned attempts to reflect a Jewish presentation of Christian doctrines that do not reflect the fullness of the doctrine and unintentionally lapse into error.
One of the more prominent of these is an assault on the doctrine of the Trinity using the same sorts of arguments associated with various pseudo-Christian sects. A lesser but still serious aberration is an attempt to redefine the Trinity by keeping its essence but presenting it in a new form that the backers believe presents better the “Hebrew Roots” of the doctrine. Unfortunately, such restructuring is often done without consulting the original writings at the time of the Ecumenical Councils and thus it goes forward without a complete understanding of the issues and the implications of altering the original definitions.
It also never occurs to these folks that God in His sovereign will chose a time when the Mediterranean world was under the rule of one state (the Roman Empire) whose engineering feats had made quick travel over long distances possible through its vast network of roads, the highly expressive Greek language was the common tongue for learning, and Hellenistic culture had greatly influenced much of the known world since Alexander the Great.
david lee parker
“But all of these things are closed in a darkness, away from impious people.” –My last comment of the day, promise. I love this sentence. If God could be proven by, say, a logical proof, He would be God only of logicians. God however is equally accessible to the normal, the autistic (like me), the mentally retarded (hope that’s not too un-PC); the last words Alzheimer’s victims often remember are the words of the Our Father: no human is as democratic as God.