In Which Nick Reads Theology Badly

So I am reading Paul Tillich's A History of Christian Thought.  It's for my online seminary class -- I figure that now that Virginia's Constitutional ban on gay marriage has been found unconstitutional that, eventually, there will be a fortune to be made officiating marriages of all kinds once we start down the slippery slope towards man on pumpkin sex.  It's coming people.  May as well cash in.  Really, if Jimmy-Bob wants to marry Clarice the Pumpkin, well, who am I to stand in the way of that?  Especially if they are willing to pay a steep officiant's fee?

Sure sure, there are easier ordinations to obtain, but I've never been about doing things the easy way.  If I did, I would've driven up and down the Appalachian Mountain range instead of walking the whole damn way. Of course, Sammy-John Tibideau's Virtual School for Religious Studies isn't exactly Yale Divinity School, but it's hard enough.

So, where am I?  I've just started, basically, and the early Church theologians are wrestling deeply with the problem of Christ's divinity.  It seems, perhaps, trivial to us, persnickety, but early in the life of the Church it was very important to establish why Christ was so important, what made him different from other mystics or prophets.  If he can't be established as a divine figure, somehow fully God, than maybe Christianity becomes just another movement to spring out of the Hellenistic period of the Jewish religion.

I did read one thing that I found interesting.  It came out of the Apologetic movement, which was an early defense of Christianty against Roman intellectuals.  I may be misreading it or pulling it out of context, but it seems they said that Christianty represents the ultimate truth, and there is no truth that cannot be included in the Christian principle (which for him would be that Christ is the Logos and blah blah blah blah).  

Tillich said, basically, that what that means is that if there is an existential truth anywhere that cannot be enveloped by Christian thought than Jesus cannot be the Christ.  

I found that to be an interesting idea.  It implies an understanding of God that is big enough to allow for new experiences of our reality to be meshed with Christian thought, a faith supple enough to accommodate, for example, the Theory of Evolution or new understandings of human sexuality.  It may undermine the authority of the Scriptures, but then again if Jesus is truly Christ than God should not, perhaps, be bound by what is ultimately a divinely inspired but all to human document.  

Shhhh!  What's that?  I think it's the ground shaking under me.  Maybe I'm wrong and God has decided to silence the voice of a heretic....

Nope.  I'm just hungry.  Bit of cheese will take care of that.