Day 5. September 11, 2006
Movement 1. Dei Filius
Lecture 2. From Jesus to Christ: How the Jesus of History Became the Christ of Faith (Part 4)
Lecture 3. Dei Filius: The Jesus of the Catholic World (Part 1)
Christian orthodoxy took shape over five centuries particularly in conflicts among claims about the true Jesus. Competing groups claimed to possess the true oral tradition or the true written tradition or revelation from the Spirit or a connection to the apostolic generation or possession of Gnostic wisdom or the power to work miracles and so on. The Catholic Church had codified its faith at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE in a creed - the Nicene Creed - dominated by Jesus. But crucially Emperor Constantine's legalization of Christianity used state power to establish orthodoxy out of competing claims in the late 4th century. Subsequent Church councils further codified beliefs now backed by state power. Between 500 and 1500 CE Christianity took shape as the official religion of the Roman and then the western world. Though the eastern and western churches divided in 1054, the beliefs outlined in the Nicene Creed formed the nucleus of a Christian Cosmos fed by sacraments administered by the Church, explicated in the Church's magisterium, and ritually dramatized according to a calendar ordered by the life of Jesus and a growing company of saints, most centrally the Virgin Mary.