And every generation since then as well...
No. By your own accounting, it was A (one) person" (hypostasis) encountered. I asked you repeatedly for ANY occasion of ANYONE encountering the alleged three hypostases at any point.
No one has encountered the Father, as far as I have heard witness from the Orthodox. He dwells in unapproachable light. Others have encountered the Son or the Holy Spirit, but not both.
There isn't a living human in history who has concurrently encountered the alleged three hypostases; and even if someone had encountered Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such a manner, it STILL DOESN'T mean they're individuated hypostases.
It's a doctrinal formulaic. And it's an inversion of the true uni-hypostatic multi-phenomenality of God. God is not Gorilla-glued siamese triplets. The one God is the Father, as is His Logos and Pneuma. You should actually be quite thankful the Holy Spirit is not an individuated hypostasis, because He hypostatically co-inheres YOU to the Son.
We are surrounded, my Brother, by a GREAT CLOUD of witnesses...
Your appeal to a consensus dialectic is noted. A small contained majority who are identically indoctrinated is not a compelling argument. I'm sure it's a logical fallacy of some sort.
From generation to generation...
As are most who are religiously zealous. Proponents of ancient religions can boast of this in some manner. And it IS boasting of some proportion. The pride of precedence, when God is timeless.
God knows that there are not-humble Orthodox... But humility is the chief of virtues they disciple within and disciple to others... It is the one, singular virtue that the demons do not have the ability to imitate... There is a fake virtue for every genuine one, except humility...
You'd have to provide a bit of evidence for this apophatic. I'd have to say the fruit of the Spirit is not consistently immitable, but I don't think you're accurately representing the minions of him who appears as an angel of light.
And you are justifying pride by accusing the Orthodox of not being humble EITHER...
Sigh. I never said any such thing. My statement was the absolute assurance and confident persuasion of faith, not pride. I have taken very seriously the ministry of reconciliation given us. It should be part of our testimony as those who are IN Christ.
And then saying that theirs is but the product of a handful of men 17 centuries ago...
Well... You can't have it both ways. Subsequent Believers just adhered to the taught dogma. They certainly weren't part of the Cappadocian Fathers' efforts (which I greatly applaud, if you'll recall).
You insist God cannot be known or described in definition to any greater degree than was done by the Early Fathers, who didn't and couldn't account for heaven being created. It's their bare assertion as lip service to a created heaven that is the problem. You can't see how timelessness and everlasting time have been co-mingled and declared as somehow distinct.
When the truth is that this Faith has gone forth into all the world,
Hold up, there, Hoss. As much disdain as I have for the Latins and certain things about the Reformation and its modern Evangelical-skunk offspring spraying everything in sight with binaries of splintered doctrines... at least the Reformed tradition allows for an eternal, infinite, immense, and innately transcendent God to be more deeply revealed through the ages of the faith.
And it is not the paltry and minimal evangelistic efforts of the Orthodox that have spread the Christian faith around the globe. That would be the efforts of the Latins and their spawn as Protestants. You should actually be embarassed at the (lack of) evangelistic history in Orthodoxy. The US presence itself is quite recent and marginal, with little real focus on any attempts to convert the lost on any scale.
You don't even know what multi-phenomenality IS yet; and you've insisted God isn't uncreated phenomenon or that He even is conscious of Himself. The degree of apophaticism in Orthodoxy is numbing any real apprehension of the final depths of truth for Theology Proper.
The Son is the express image OF God's hypostasis; the exact impress OF that singular hypostasis upon the wax of His LITERAL Logos, sealed with His OWN Spirit upon that which would be unrolled as creation's scroll to be RE-presented by a distint eternal prosopon in the created heaven.
This is not remotely ANY form of Modalism, but is that which Modalists were attempting to access in opposition to multi-hypostaticsm. Modalists are uni-phenomenalists, like you are. You have more in common with Modalists, Arians, Binitarians, Unitarians, (and even Gnostics) etc. than I do. All of you are uni-phenomenalists. That's the central problem with ALL competing historical formulaics, including the endless modern proliferation of bogus three-hypostases trinities.
and has been producing Godly men and women in each and every generation who have what all the Fathers have had, which is theoria of God... And the Gifts thereof...
Arsenios
As have all dilutions of the Christian faith in the Latin and Protestant traditions.
I love you, my Brother. I love the Orthodox. I love the depth of truth and the heritage of faithfulness.
There was one thing missed. One. And that is common to ALL Theology Proper models throughout the ages.
It's not arrogance for me to search that out and have it revealed to me. It's faith and obedience.
