Article Sidebar
Published:
Aug 24, 2021Keywords:
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
Godhead and humankind: The New Testament in unison with creedal Christianity
Andries G. van Aarde
Abstract
The aim of this article is to argue that the sharing of ‘being’ between Jesus and the Godhead, professed in creedal Christianity and based on the Nicaean creed, pertains to a ‘sameness in divine substance’. This substance refers to divine wisdom, justice and mercy. The article attempts to demonstrate that there exists a congruence between textual evidence in the New Testament and these ‘orthodox’ belief tenets, especially represented in the Athanasian creed. This is explained in terms of an analysis of the origins and development of creedal formulae. This process represents a movement from a fundamental religious experience to a ‘use’ of metaphorical language, to the origins of confessional formulae that lead to the formulation of dogma. In light of the insight into the ‘building blocks’ of the formation of confessional formulae, the article concludes with a ‘deconstruction’ of the concepts ‘anathematisation’ and ‘heresy’.
