Christianity has serious problems with logic. What the Church has done historically is to posit its own set of assertions that have limited-to-no evidentiary basis but must be accepted “on faith.” For the most part, once you accept these base assertions, the Church has done a creditable job of applying logic from that point forward to expound its doctrines logically.
Today’s saint, Hippolytus, made his chops by being one of the earliest and most prolific writers of Christian orthodoxy. Notice the way in which Butler describes one of the works written by Hippolytus:
In his work . . . he clearly proves the distinction of the persons in the Trinity, the divinity of God the Son, and the distinction of the divine and human natures in Christ. . . .
Proves? How does one prove the Trinity? The natures in Christ?
Based on my experience, I will tell you what “proves” means in this context. It means that Hippolytus stated two things:
- The only way that the crucifixion-and-resurrection makes sense as a means of providing forgiveness for unavoidable human sinfulness (you know: original sin) is if Jesus–a human who died–was also God, but was not the entirety of God (i.e., God cannot just “be dead”) but yet was at all times fully God because that’s how God rolls; therefore Jesus must have at all times on earth been fully human and fully God, but contained in one single person, and although God is never one single person and is One nonetheless, yet this single person who was fully human and fully divine and distinct from the God who never died but is still the same God, and then there’s this Holy Spirit that proceeds, inexorably, from the relationship of this fully-human-fully-divine God and the God that is not the same but is still One with that person, and, because this Holy Spirit proceeds from that relationship, it/he/she must necessarily be a part of, one with, but distinct from, the God-God and the God-human.
- Anyone who disagrees with any part of the above is anathema, a heretic, deserving of eternal damnation, and just plain Bad.
Got it?
Think of this as a massive Jenga® tower with two crucial blocks at its base. What is more, orthodox Christian theology all topples if you pull out either of these blocks–if you do not accept that Jesus (inarguably a Jew) was resurrected post-crucifixion, OR if you do not believe that his crucifixion-and-resurrection was both necessary and effective to make God’s forgiveness available for other humans’ sins. Without these, there is no Christian religion. They have been so foundational for so long that no Christian even bothers seriously even to try jiggling them
Now these Jenga-type blocks–the facticity of the crucifixion AND resurrection of Jesus-the-Jew, and that this two-part event sufficiently meets the requirements to achieve Divine forgiveness for human sin–can theoretically support any number of configurations atop them. Nevertheless, one must (howsoever grudgingly) recognize that the structure that Christianity created and buttressed and labeled “orthodoxy” has survived a very, very long time. The success of orthodoxy is surprisingly simple: prevent all challengers (aka heretics) from fiddling with the foundation blocks, and engage them in focusing only on pulling out one or another of the Jenga blocks from the middle of the tower–such as disagreeing about how many natures Christ has or whether Jesus’s humanity was just skin-deep or how authoritative tradition is as compared to the Bible itself.
Hippolytus was a major, early architect of this sturdy tower–enough so to be declared a saint. Just remember not to jiggle those foundation blocks…