Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Dialogue with Aquinas: A Systematic Refutation of Divine Simplicity     Introduction:            The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DS) has been held by the Church for centuries through the works of great theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. However, under scrutiny it will be demonstrated that the doctrine has no legs to stand on. Firstly, a systematic articulation of DS will be provided for background context. Secondly, I will offer several objections and incoherencies that DS entails. Thirdly, I will provide a possible alternate solution to understanding the relationship between God’s attributes and essence. This essay-style blog post will replace all of my other blogs on the same subject as this is the synthesis of them.   Chapter I: What is Divine Simplicity? Divine simplicity (DS) is the idea that God's attributes are identical to each other in His reality. Attributes, for example, are love, wrath, know...

Notes of the Overview of the Early Church Fathers: On the Trinity and Incarnation      In our exploration of early Christian thought, our focus is directed towards understanding the evolving perspectives on the Trinity and the Incarnation as articulated by influential figures within the Church such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, Origen of Alexandria, Athanasius, and others, thus providing a comprehensive understanding of the theological landscape that shaped Christianity during its nascent stages. While I cannot go over all the early church fathers since that would take up the length of the book, investigating these influential individuals who are mostly saints will have to suffice. This will also ignore early modalist theologians (who believed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one person and modes of God), gnostic theologians (who believed in many gods and that Jesus was not a human), and Jewish-christian th...

Hidden Nestorianism: Unveiling the Orthodox Dilemma of The Two Sons Worry     The Oxford English Dictionary defines Nestorianism as “The doctrine of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople (appointed in 428), by which Christ is asserted to have had distinct human and divine persons.” Nestorian Christology promotes the concept of a prosopic union of two persons that are divine and human in Jesus Christ, thus trying to avoid and replace the concept of a hypostatic union. This Christological position is defined as radical Dyophysitism, and differs from orthodox Dyophysitism, or that Christ was one divine person with two natures, which was reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Such teachings brought Nestorius into conflict with other prominent church leaders, most notably Cyril of Alexandria, who issued 12 anathemas against him. Nestorius’ teachings were deemed heretical at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and again at the Council of Chalcedon. The early church fathers belie...