Of one being with the Father

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

— John — John 1:1 (WEB)

Reorientation does the unglamorous work of getting the central things right and saying them clearly. The phase asks more than a renewed mood; it asks a recovered foundation. Here it means returning to the deity of Christ, the bearing everything else hangs on, and confessing it plainly enough that the next storm cannot wash it away.

Your rebuilt faith has load-bearing convictions, truths that, if they slipped, would bring the whole structure down with them. Not every belief you hold needs the same grip; some are decorative, and some are the floor. The deity of Christ is one such floor. Not every conviction carries the same weight, and a reorienting faith has to learn which ones are load-bearing. The scarred bishops at Nicaea knew. If the Son were only a creature, then the cross is only a noble man dying, the gospel is only good advice, and your worship is misplaced; the whole house stands or falls here. So they did the slow, contentious, exhausting work of getting one thing exactly right and saying it plainly.

There is a temptation, when you are rebuilding, to hold every belief with the same loose grip, or to treat doctrine as cold compared to experience. But when the next shaking comes, you will not have time to reason your way back to the foundation. So tell the weight-bearing convictions from the decorative ones, settle this one now, and stand there on purpose. But some truths are the floor. Lose them and the rooms you furnished so carefully fall through into the dark. The discipline of reorientation is partly this: telling the weight-bearing convictions from the decorative ones, and refusing to let the foundation blur to keep the peace.

When a teaching named for the presbyter Arius spread through the Church like a fever, insisting the Son was the highest of creatures but a creature still, it threw the whole Body off its bearings for years. At Nicaea the Church found them again. The scarred bishops gathered there, some missing fingers and eyes from the persecutions, refused the smooth half-truth and confessed the Son as of one being with the Father, fully God, eternally begotten and not made, anchoring at last to what John had said in his first breath. The Church reorienting after a doctrinal storm does what they did: it returns to the foundation and confesses it without fog, laying the next generation a floor they can stand on without having to dig down to it alone.

Councils convene and councils could have failed, and the men who gathered were mortal and scarred. What cannot be shaken is the One they confessed, the eternal Son who was God before any creed described Him. The wording can be argued and improved; the Word it points to was God from the beginning and is God still, unmade and unmovable.

1. Which of my convictions are truly load-bearing, the ones that would bring everything down if they went?
2. Have I held the deity of Christ as the floor of my faith, or quietly let it blur to keep things easy?
3. Where am I treating every belief with the same loose grip, when some of them deserve to be settled and stood on?