I am currently in the middle of a discussion with a friend of mine who to be honest, has a lot of weird ideas. He likes to take quotations out of context and throw them at me and then say, “Aha! Gotcha!” When I take time to read the proof of my perfidity, I just scratch my head and wonder what he’s been smoking. The reason he sees it the way he did is because he came with his mind made up and was sat on finding something to put me in my place.
The focus of our current discussion is the heresy of Arianism. This goes back to an early Christian teacher called Arias, who was involved with the controversy of the Nicean council. His basic teaching was that Jesus was a created being. At best he was a minor God. Of course, this opened up the controversies about trying to understand the Trinity. In fact, he was rejecting the orthodox position of the church.
One of the scriptures that gets thrown in is in Proverbs 8. In that Proverb wisdom is personified and when you get down to verse 22 and the passage after that, you find that there are qualities laid upon wisdom which crossover enter the description of Jesus. A few verse down you read this,
Proverbs 8:25 (KJV) Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:The “brought forth” can have the idea of being born. Arias interpreted this to mean that wisdom, which he equates with Jesus, is a created being.
This is where heresy is born. It is born in the mind of the perceiver. When you come to something with your mind made up what it’s going to say, you can find just about anything you want. When he came to this verse, Arias was allowing his arrogance and his confidence in his own intellectual ability to supersede what he knew the Bible taught.
If you come to these verses with an understanding of what the Bible teaches about, Jesus, then you read this and look for something inspiring about it. You don’t look for a way to undermine the rest of the Bible. It’s called studying with a spirit of humility instead of arrogance.
Attitude is so important when we come to scripture. I think most of the heretics in the world and most of the pagans of the world come to their research with the idea that they are smarter than the average bear and will find that they deserve the picnic basket on the table in spite of the signs.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.