I suppose this is relevant on account of it being Easter.

Growing up Catholic, we always said the Nicene Creed during Mass, which kind of enumerates the standard Catholic beliefs. I never thought much about it, but a non-Christian friend who joined me one time said thought it was creepy and cult like, us all standing there saying it in unison. I appreciated a universal, orthodox set of beliefs determined to be "correct" by experts, rather than the Wild West of Protestantism where it seemed every church was more unique and centered around its pastor.

I was pretty surprised to learn the Council of Nicaea wasn't until a few hundred years after the ostensible start of the church, and remember thinking it was strange how it was all topsy turvy right after the supposed events around Jesus, and went several generations when no one original was still around before it settled down.

The history of the early Church is pretty interesting from a political / anthropological perspective.

Protestants still recite the nicean creed assuming they have a high church setting. With modern worship , all bets are off.

Thought the article says the council 'settled' christology, it still took hundreds of years before it was popularly resolved: for, at least, the first 500 years of christianity jesus was widely regarded as something more like a demigod.

This fairly clearly what Paul thought; with Luke likely believing just in a messianic role.

Early christianity is perhaps best seen as greeking of judaism: god the father is zeus, the angles are demigods, jesus is a half-human offspring of zeus, jesus has been sent to destroy the demonic forces and end the process of death (whereby we're sent to the underworld, etc.). Satan as something more like a peer of God (this indeed, was the original OT role: santan was an angle appointed by god to test people).

The whole thing starts to make less-and-less sense the more this greek frame is dropped: if jesus ends up being god himself, and there is no hell, etc. it becomes basically incoherent. Why would god send god to resurrect people which is something god can already do?

There is no clear 'early Christianity'. By the first time we have any evidence, there are already many different interpretations.

Then you agree with me. My phrasing is for an audience who is unaware that the gospels already disagree on Christology. I was retrospectively talking about the pauline-johnian views which won and what they were like

I don't think actual Paul and 'John' would agree on much but I know what you are saying.

Yahweh was originally a weather god, not unlike Zeus, well before being interwoven with El during proto-Judaism [1]. Any "Greek period" of the eventual Jewish faith, to which you refer, ended certainly by their complete adoption of monotheism. Judaism came "pre-Greeked".

That particular Council affirmed that Christianity's God is triune by expressly rejecting Arianism. God sending God to do things God could already do is heavily a consequence of the trinity [2], hence why Nicaea was a big deal theologically.

Whether a monotheistic God is unary, binary, trinary, etc has implications that seem sufficiently fundamental that no major religion will abandon its chosen view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity

Not sure why this is on HN. Council of Nicaea is a favorite flashpoint for conspiracy theory people. But in reality it wasn't all that special. It was just one event in many that shaped Christianity. Basically its like a ISO Standards meeting. Lots of old guys making obscure arguments based on interpretations of obscure text about things that essentially don't matter outside of a bunch of nerds.

The connection between their arguments and the actual resulting Christian practice is tenuous at best or more likely irrelevant.

And all things considered its pretty late in the formation of Christianity of the Church. By 325 the church was pretty unified on the most important things.

Its just more famous because we have slightly better documentation for this history. We have almost nothing for the first century. In the second century our records are incredibly spotty and fragmented. It gets a bit better in the 3rd and 4rd century.

There is so much interesting 'Christian' history of the early 2 centuries that people are totally unaware off. If you want to see into some of that strange history, you might want to read something like: "Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE"

Council of Nicaea is a favorite flashpoint for conspiracy theory people

Could you please elaborate on that a bit? I do not know much about conspiracy theories, but I am curious why an event so ancient can fuel contemporary conspiracies

Arianism is easily in my top 3 heterodoxies. (Along with Pelagianism and Lollardism, though the moment Charismatic Catholicism is officially condemned Wycliffe gets bumped to an ignoble 4).

Not catholic, just an enjoyer of church history.

The "pantheism" ascribed to Spinoza (as alluded to by Einstein) is my favourite.

(and Dirk Willems my favourite martyr, although I do find it highly apropos that Barbara is the patron saint of the РВСН)

Spinoza was Jewish though.

(a) if my theology be accurate, at least jews, christians, muslims, and mormons all believe they believe in the same god (their differences lying in beliefs as to which prophets had commit bits), so it's not surprising that Rome would have declared their impression of his philosophy an official heresy, eg https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documen...

(b) although he said he was being misinterpreted, his congregation* also threw him out for what they saw as heresy.

* reform is XIX, and haredim are XX, so it's probably safe to say his XVII congregation was orthodox?

Well, I just meant that Spinoza was a Jewish heretic, not a Christian heretic (at least, no more than say, Mohammad), since the discussion was about Christian heresies specifically. The encyclical only discusses pantheism rather than Spinoza---I don't know that pantheism is specifically Spinoza's invention. Of course, no doubt that Spinoza wouldn't be considered a conforming Christian by any Christian church, but not just because he wrote "Deus sive Natura" (the extent to which Spinoza's thought on the relationship between God and creation is incompatible with classical theism is up for debate, it seems to me. See the interesting comments by /u/wokeupabug here - https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/nar433/how_d...).

Thanks for the wokeupabug comments; very interesting!

Now I am mediating on the contrast between "God created the best possible Creation" and "God creates all possible Creations" (Spinoza opting for the latter on omnipotence grounds; being limited to creating an element of the lattice is less potent than creating an ideal of the lattice). This seems to imply an infinite lattice* of Creations, for in a finite lattice, we could always identify the possible Creations with their principal Creation?

* yes, I haven't defined either meet or join of Creations; please bear with me on this point...

EDIT: forgot "panentheism"; IIUC:

  theism:      God & Creation = ∅
  panentheism: God & Creation = Creation
  pantheism:   God            = Creation

I don't know if theologians have a word for it, but the most general situation would be that both (God & Creation) and (God ^ Creation) may take on values other than God, Creation, and ∅.

Right - but "God creates all possible Creations" is true for Spinoza but only in the sense that for Spinoza there is only one possible creation, the one that we are living in now, so God creates the only possible creation. As in, there are no possible potential realities for Spinoza---the only possible world is the one that we're living in. And so for Spinoza, God's omnipotence is expressed through his actualization of creation---that is, roughly speaking, it's not just that God could do anything that is possible, it's that God is willing everything that is possible right now, because the only possible way for things to be is the way things are (this is what wokeupabug means when he talks about Spinoza's conflation of God's power and will). This is, to be sure, something that classical theists would quarrel with.

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For your edit:

I don't know about "God & Creation = empty set", it depends on what exactly you mean by that. Classical theists say that all things don't exist independently, but exist in/through/from God (the prepositions vary). What exactly does that mean? Well, a lot of ink has been spilled fleshing out what the relationship between God and creation is, and people have had various ideas on what it is. It seems to me to be an oversimplification to categorize things neatly into theism/pantheism/panentheism without further clarification; these things are complicated. It's been said of Aquinas (certainly a little-o orthodox theologian), apparently, that he's the closest you can be to being a pantheist without being a pantheist.

OK, how about this model: God (being a Proper god) could create inconsistent worlds, but will not (and the only consistent world is our own). Would this model be true for both Spinoza and for classical theists?

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for my edit; the formalisations were attempts to convey (although I agree they're probably oversimplifications) the following general ideas:

   God & Creation = ∅
   (the Creator and the Creation are distinct;
    nothing is part of both)

   God & Creation = Creation 
   is equivalent to God ⊇ Creation
   (the Creation is part of the Creator)

   God = Creation
   is equivalent to (God ⊇ Creation ∧ Creation ⊇ God)
   (the Creation and the Creator equivale:
    they may be freely substituted in a proof)