B. U. G. S.

I keep pointing out that church history is a fascinating guide to how the human mind works.

Gautama Buddha made it very clear that he was enlightened, but very much a man. But Buddhist theologians have developed complex theories to show how their Buddha did not come out of gthe “dirty” womb of a woman.

The gigantic community of Hellenized Jews who became the Christian Church still had trouble with the idea that Jesus, who was very much a man, could also be God. A majority of bishops believed that Jesus was above the angels, but below God.

Jesus the man had come back to earth and shown the Apostles that he was a man by eating a piece of fish and allowing the Apostle Thomas, the original Doubting Thomas, to put his hand into the wound in Christ’s side.

Jesus had sat and EATEN with the sinners, the tax-gatherers and usurers.

Every “Christian” loves to say, “We are all sinners” but he never BELIEVES it. The average self-styled Christian today would have led the mob to stone Jesus.

So when the Hellenized Jews accepted Christ they did not doubt he was a man, but the traditional faith of Hellenized Jews held to the idea that G-d was invisible. So Jesus was the savior and above the angels, but he was not God.

The Council of Nicea decided that Christ was both God and man. The idea that Jesus was above the angels but not God became the Arian Heresy.

There was an exact geographical split. The Hellenized world finally accepted the idea that Christ was both God and man, but in the Middle East, which had enough trouble accepting this savior in the first place, the idea that a man was also God was repeatedly challenged. The Arian Heresy caused constant rebellion against the church and kept it permanently weak.

In the end, a non-Christian faith took over the Middle East with astonishing ease. That faith said that Jesus was above the angels but below God, who stands alone.

That faith is called Islam.

If you a Christian, a Moslem or an athiest, this is a terrific lesson in human nature.

If you are not obsessed with labels, you discover that the thinking of the Middle East remained the same. If you are to understand the Moslem Shiites, you must understand that Iranian thinking is still in the Zoroastrian tradition.

Don’t get this backwards the way a theologian would. I am NOT saying that Middle Easterners were influenced by Arianism, I am saying that Arianism appealed to Middle Eastern thinking. Islam did not win out there because of unreconstructed Arians. Islam won because it appealed tot he same ingrained thinking that made Arianism so strong in the Middle East.

Middle Easterners want a G-d who is invisible, all powerful, and who regards men not as fellow men but as less than his slaves. There is only one God and he is God. There is no room for a God who is just another man.

Shiites do not exist because of a lingering memory of Zoroastrian wisdom. They are Shiites because of a mindset that their own Zoroastrianism appealed to.

It was not the theology of Islam that appealed to the Middle East, it was their natural mindset. This is a complete mystery to the theologian. He believes that mindsets come entirely from theologians. He believes in quotes, not in cultures.