One

The nucleus, or heart, of the undivided church’s beliefs is found in these words of St Paul.

“There is one body and one Spirit- just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call- one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

St Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle, Eph 4: 4-6

The word that cannot be missed in the verses above is the word “ONE”. It can be said that the teachings of the Lord, the apostles, and the church fathers cannot be apprehended unless one grasps this oneness of God, the faith, and the church. For this reason, I would like to begin my presentation of this ancient faith of the undivided apostolic church with this oneness. I want to begin with a consideration of the one God, then move on to a consideration the one faith, and finally with a consideration of the one church.

To the undivided church, the oneness of God was much more than a mere a numeric value assigned to the gods. In fact, the oneness of God had much more to do with the kind of God than the number of gods. I begin with the premise that Christ was a good teacher, and thus made himself understood to his disciples. Thus, the fullness of the truth about this one God was first fully given by Christ to His apostles, these disciples then taught and explained this oneness to those we call “the church Fathers,” & since then it has been the main task of the church to protect these truths without any additions or subtractions. For this reason, when certain controversies arose in the church about the kind of one God that was brought shown us by Jesus, the church had to fight to preserve for the original understanding of the same God that Jesus brought to the world’s eyes. The primary weapon employed in the church’s defense was a few particular terms. The goal of these new terms was not to formulate a new kind of God, but rather to preserve the one truth, & one faith.

In the blogs to follow I will be considering the kind of God that they strove to keep unaltered by considering such words as: Trinity, essence, persons, & energies. In addition, I will strive to point out how the centrality of these terms has been moved out to the edges of the contemporary Christian faith, which in many cases have rendered it another faith.