This year the Catholic Church celebrates the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea I, held from May 20 to July 25, 325. This magazine issue is dedicated to the central theme of the Council: the divinity of Jesus Christ, as opposed to the Arian heresy that claimed that Jesus was the most exalted creature, but was still only a created man, thus denying his divinity. The Church reaffirmed what was her faith from the beginning: “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, born of the Father before all ages: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, of the same nature as the Father…”.
To affirm and believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, God-made-man, is of the first order for Christian faith and spirituality. Since only God can save humanity, if Christ is not fully God, then his passion, death, and resurrection would have been insufficient to redeem mankind. Consequently, spirituality would no longer be based on the incarnation, but on a utopian anthropocentrism, centered on a good person, with an attractive message and an innovative morality, but which would not succeed in connecting the man of yesterday and today with the mystery of God, but rather in distancing him more and more from a disincarnated spiritualism or from an intellectualism that would be limited to mere mental lucubrations. Finally, the Kingdom of God, a central theme in the preaching of Jesus, would be reduced to mere pretensions of social justice without transcendence in the hereafter.
In reality, Arianism is still very current. A clear manifestation of this is the Protestant-tinged chapel believers, which seeks to drown the incarnation in individualistic subjectivism, confining itself to praise and song, blinding itself to the world’s evil, and deafening itself to the cries of the suffering of the poor. It is also visible in those who pretend to build the Kingdom of God from Marxist assumptions of liberation, reducing justice as something merely societal, which leads to class struggle and violence as a banner of redemption. In all these cases, the epicenter of the reality of injustice is not found: sin and the father of sin, who denies God, man, and morality. However, we know that God has already conquered and we are called to expand this victory in the sinful structures of the world with solidary structures of grace.
Today it is essential to actualize, in personal and associated life, the divinity of Jesus Christ, since it comes to actualizing in history the Emmanuel, that is, “God with us”. Thus the absolute novelty of God’s action in history is posited: on the one hand, only Jesus Christ, by his divinity and humanity, can be the only mediator between God and mankind. On the other hand, the incarnation structures Christian spirituality, because we do not believe in someone alien to our human nature, but in the Son who redeems from below and from within, to elevate human dignity to the primordial will of God, according to the prayer of Jesus: “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us” (Jn 17:21).
Moreover, the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ guarantee that the liturgy celebrated on earth is truly the worship pleasing to the Father by the whole Church united to Jesus Christ, with direct repercussions in reality, as an incarnate prolongation of the faith in the world. Finally, it allows us to have a faith vision of reality in which history is not the mere accomplishment of meaningless events, but an authentic history of salvation, in which God unfolds his salvific project. In the same way, political charity, which is nourished by charity with a capital letter, which is God himself, allows us to recognize in our neighbor the sacred dignity of the person and to assume that every attack against this dignity constitutes a scandal for the Christian and an urgent call to fight against every cause that oppresses, exploits and denigrates the person. A vision of faith that allows us to understand that behind every structure of sin and every political error, there is a profound theological error, that is, an incorrect understanding of God, man, and the world.
Through Mary God became flesh; she became part of a people; she was the center of history. She is the point of connection between heaven and earth. Without Mary, the Gospel is disembodied, disfigured and transformed into ideology, into spiritualistic rationalism.CELAM, Document o Puebla, n 301
