Jeremy approaches Bible teaching with a passion for getting the basic doctrines explained so that the individual can understand them and then apply them to circumstances in their life. These basic and important lessons are nestled in a framework of history and progression of revelation from the Bible so the whole of Scripture can be applied to your physical and spiritual life.
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The smallest letter of the Greek alphabet makes the Son and the Holy Spirit the same as the Father. And this distinction, fully developed by the western church, gave rise to the political freedom we enjoy in the west and particularly in the USA.
Jeremy Thomas is the pastor at Spokane Bible Church in Spokane, Washington and a professor at Chafer Theological Seminary. He has been teaching the Bible for over 20 years, always seeking to present its truths in a clear and understandable manner.
Welcome to Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas and our series on the New Testament framework. Today, a smaller, bite-sized piece from the larger lesson. We hope you enjoy it.
At any rate, the Western churches said what? We need to add to the Nicene Creed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and we need to add and the Son to account for these passages. And by doing that, we'll shut down Arianism forever because Arianism is saying Jesus isn't even God. And so we can't have that. So this will lock the door on that. We will shut the door on this heresy.
Unfortunately, they didn't because there's still a group of, it's it's remarkable. There's a modern group of Arians still, they don't go under the term or name Arians, but they are the Jehovah's Witnesses. And they are very, very close to ancient Arian beliefs. And so we'll talk about them some. But this is the description of the spirit proceeding from the Father.
Now, the Eastern churches, again, they didn't get invited to the conference. They didn't get to vote on whether we should add and the son, the Filioque clause. So they got mad and they rejected it. And ever since then, the Eastern and Western churches have been divided. And they've never been able to get past this point. And the Eastern churches, which Greek Orthodox, you know, and the Russian Orthodox Church
basically went their own ways. And you can see what has happened politically in those areas of the world. And fundamentally, the reason that they have had political tyranny and oppressive regimes is because they've had a weak Christ. Because the East did not want to develop the second person of the Trinity's role in the Godhead, they had a weak Christ, and as a consequence, whenever you have a weak Christ, there's a void or a vacuum, and something has to fill that void. And the thing that will always fill the void is the state. The state will take power and it will become the savior. It will be the proclaimed, self-proclaimed savior of those people, and it will prevail and dominate them. And that's what happened in these. But we'll talk about that later.
But what happened in the West? Constitutionalism, liberty. There is balance in the authority structure. Once you have a strong Christ, and the West developed the theology of the Trinity, they really focused on Christ, they really developed Christ, they also developed the Spirit. So you had three in one, and they are all equally authoritative, because they're all equally God. And that created a diversity of power within the Trinity, right? Three persons but one God. So there's diversity of power in the authority structure. And what do you see in constitutionalism? A balance of powers. Well, supposed to. That was the whole goal, right, of the Constitution in 1789 was to have three branches of government, each with equal power to keep balance so each could check the other. And what do we also see in the West? We see balance of authority structure in other social structures, such as marriage, husband and wife. Different roles, but equal in essence. Each being fully human, but serving in the respective roles. That nice balance that we have, friends, that's just that's not everywhere in the world. The reason we have that nice balance is because we have the Trinity developed in Western theology of Europe and moving to America. We have the same thing in family and so forth. So we have this nice balance of authority structure because ultimately in the West they developed the full Trinitarian theology, and that has filtered down into all of our structures in life.
Now, so this clause became very important in church history. Now, Edwin Gibbon, who wrote a very important work on the fall of Rome, he looked at this dispute in church history and he kind of mocked the whole thing. He said, Doesn't matter one iota. The iota is the smallest letter in the Greek language. So it's one of the letters that are 22 letters of their alphabet, the iota. And uh he said, doesn't matter one iota. You probably heard that too. Doesn't matter one iota, that's coming from Gibbon. You may not have read the book, but that's where it came from. Uh he said this whole dispute between East and West didn't matter one iota. It was just a silly dispute. Now, what he was referring to actually was there are two words, what the Arians use and the words the Athanasians used. And the Athanasians were more, they were Trinitarian, and the the Arians were not. They didn't believe that Jesus was God. He was just made, he's just a creature. But it's an interesting story because in the Greek the the word homoousias means of the same substance. And that's what the Athanasians were saying. They were saying Jesus Christ is of the same substance as the Father, meaning he's of the equal essence. He's God. That's what they mean. Homo, meaning same ousias, same substance. But the Arians said, no, he's homoiusias. And it has a little iota in there. And that's the only letter that's different between those two words. That is the only letter. Homoi means like, not same, but like. He's like the father, but not the same. And Gibbon said, it doesn't matter one iota. He's making a play on that one letter in the word homoysius versus homo homousius. So the thing is, it does matter one iota.
Tell the people in Russia or Eastern Europe that it doesn't matter when they understand their history and the implications of what transpired in 589 A.D. at the Council of Toledo versus people in the West, who have historically enjoyed much more freedom and balance of authority, structure, and power. It matters one iota. That iota is everything, because on one hand you've got Trinitarianism, on the other hand, you don't have Trinitarianism at all. And therefore, you're always going to have concentrated power, you're going to have political tyranny whenever you don't have Trinity at the forefront. And that's why, by the way, the Russian Tsars and everybody who's ever ruled Russia has always wanted to keep Russian Orthodoxy as the only true church in the Russian people's eyes. That's why today 71% of Russians believe that the only really true church is the Russian Orthodox Church.
