When you’re playing a board game with your family or friends, and you have a question about the game, what do you do?
Let’s also hypothesize that during an Indianapolis Colts football game, a member of the opposing team decides to dribble the football down the field like a soccer ball.
In these two instances, you and I would hopefully agree that the rules for both types of games would need to be consulted.
And these rules would have an interpretation which fallible human beings could read and agree upon (the essential parts, especially).
When it comes to #Christianity as a worldview, to understand what makes it “Christianity” and not Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, New Thought, etc., we would need to consult the Christian manual: the Scriptures.
When Constantine decriminalized Christianity, along with other religions at that time, he strongly encouraged the leaders of numerous churches to meet and settle a contentious dispute regarding a central belief (Jesus’s Deity).
How did these men handle the matter? They consulted the Scriptures…both the Old Testament as well as the historical, eyewitness accounts of the biblical texts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and Jude). They looked at the Christian dictionary.
When Arius of Alexandria claimed Jesus was only a created being, the group examined what Christianity teaches about itself, inevitably proving Arius was wrong.
No new teachings were formed at this council, nor was the Bible constructed here.
💡 Friends, the Gnostic gospels found in Egypt were new to us in the 1900’s, but they were not new to the 2nd century church…These writings were rejected for legitimate reasons: 1.) The GG’s were written long after the apostles had died, and 2.) the theology did not coincide with the essential teachings of Scripture.
With all of this in view, it’s incredibly important to look back at history to examine the claims made in movies (Da Vinci Code) as well as on social media.
Resources:
✔️The graphic above was designed and produced by Wes Huff and can be found here.
✔️What Happened at the Council of Nicaea? By Wes Huff – https://lnkd.in/gd2pP634
✔️What is Christianity? Greg Koukl covers this topic in his book, The Story of Reality. Here is a video summary – https://lnkd.in/g3Zs2Kck
✔️”Did Nicaea Really Create the Bible? Debunking the popular myth that a Roman emperor and a fourth-century church council decided the canon.” By Dr. John Meade – https://textandcanon.org/the-council-of-nicea-and-the-biblical-canon/
Hold Fast Apologetics 