I grew up in a religion surfeited environment.
An environment in which everyone was "born again.
" I was the odd one out.
The black sheep in the family.
My mother was zealous for Christ, and for the conversion of her hell-bound son.
But her evangelical methods were rough and ready: sulfur, fire and brimstone.
We had a very stormy relationship over my refusal to see the light and become "born again.
" Regrettably, I had more than my fair share of the trauma of discriminatory treatment, and haranguing sermons in an environment of saints whose heaven's mandate was to drag, by the scruff of the neck, the screaming, kicking, unwilling unbeliever away from hell's wide-paved path to heaven's narrow path.
It is very unfortunate that one of the problems with belief systems laying a dubious claim to an exclusive and unique universality is that believers just cannot come to terms with the reality of dissenters; and this fact explains why the three Gorgone sisters (my nickname for Christianity, Islam and Judaism) have, in history, been the cause of so much evil, pointless quarreling and needless bloodshed.
It is enough for some to be told that at the fullness of time God sent his son to die for our sins; but the skeptical mind is like a mastiff digging for a bone it imagines buried close to the foundations of a precarious structure.
For someone like me, with a congenital predisposition to a skeptical attitude of mind, there are always more questions in life than there are worthy answers.
My loneliness predisposed me to long hours of soliloquy, in which I posed questions on the main issues of Christian teaching and sought to convince myself of their truth by contriving the best answers I could think of.
The answers never seemed good enough to satisfy my questioning mind.
Once, I fell into soliloquy, on my bed, in the dead of the night.
Jesus came, so it seemed, and struck up a conversation with me while I tossed and turned sleeplessly on bed.
He was going to win a convert to Christianity, and I was willing.
The ostracization from being the lone unbeliever in my world was taking its toll on my sanity.
Whose mother was Mary? Was she the mother of the God in Christ or the mother of the man in Christ? Was the Incarnation a devolution of God into man or an evolution of man into God? My mind, on full throttle, sought an answer with wide-open eyes in the dark.
Well...
er...
ehm...
it appears that we may say that God devolved into man at the nativity and then reverted to full divine stature at the resurrection.
Do we conclude, then, that Mary was the mother only of the man, or rather the baby? I allowed myself time to think.
Er...
Mary must have been the mother of the man as well as the mother of the God in Christ.
You couldn't call a person who had no human father a man, could you? But Asexually derived protozoa have no fathers and we don't ascribe divinity to them because of that! Hmm...
Very clever, very clever, aren't you? Well, one might say that the son of God was made flesh.
He was divine and human at once, all through his life.
More human than divine at birth; more divine that human at the resurrection; you have admitted as much.
I scratched my head in the dark, in growing confusion: Well, maybe something like that, If you insist upon it.
Whose power kept the universe going while God babbled in a manger crib? I gasped at that one.
Couldn't the universe do without its maker for a while? The understanding of the Incarnation is that God ceased to be God for a while.
But we say that God is unchanging, eternal and impassible.
No, do not misquote the scriptures there.
It is not said that God ever ceased to be God.
God is eternal and unchanging.
He retained the fullness of his divine stature at the Incarnation.
But the scriptures say that God, at the Incarnation, partook of the fullness of human nature.
You can't have your cake and eat it at the same time.
We are taught that Christ was human, very much human.
His redemptive mission was hinged on the fact of his humanity.
He was, according to St.
Paul, the prototype, the pioneer of our faith; the example in the path to our salvation.
The union of God and man in Christ did not compromise the full dimensions of the two participating natures.
It follows, then, that there were two persons in one Christ; two sons of God: the first son by virtue of heavenly origin, the second son by grace and adoption.
Yes.
One might put it that way; though I am not sure.
Now, which of the two natures suffered at Golgotha: the human nature or the divine nature? The human nature suffered and died.
God is immortal, transcendent, beyond all suffering, deprivation and death.
Which nature stilled the storm, the human or the divine? Now...
er...
look 'ere, aren't you following the path of logic too far down the slippery slope? Let's restate the orthodox position.
Christ was not a split personality.
He was one nature, one...
er...
hypostasis after the union.
Would that satisfy you? I do not understand that either.
One what? One God-man, you ferreting skeptic.
But a God-man is a hybrid, less than God, greater than man.
The God-man Jesus was not an in-between hybrid of two pure forms.
Jesus was God in the full sense of the word "God," and he was man, fully human at the same time.
Do you mean parallel co-existence of antithetical natures? Two hypostases? No.
I mean union of two hypostases into one; fusion of two antithetical natures into one.
I shook my head doubtfully in the dark.
I simply couldn't understand how...
Now, listen to me you hell-bound infidel.
God is not like you.
He can have his cake and eat it at the same time! But we have to arrive at a logically consistent definition of the Incarnation.
We couldn't find a lasting solution to the problem of the status of the Theotokos, If we cannot elaborate a self-consistent...
er...
Christology.
Now, enough of this foolishness.
I warned you to avoid those philosophy books.
Your mind is corrupted by those worthless books you read all day long.
Christ is the son of God and your savior.
Accept him into your life.
Period.
But...
Shut up will you! I rolled over and fell into a troubled sleep.