This is Communio Sanctorum, the history of the Christian Church, season two.

This episode is titled Heretics Part 6, That Pendulum Thing.

One of the features of church history is the tendency for the theological pendulum to swing

to one extreme, then back in the other direction to another.

At the risk of being simplistic, but in an attempt to keep this brief, let me condense things

like this.

The theological discussion of the early church

struggled first with how to understand Jesus and his place in the Godhead. His identity is both

God and man, and how both the Son and the Holy Spirit related to the Father in the Trinity.

Nailing that down with just the right terminology, they then dove into the deeper

issues of who Jesus was, seeking to understand how his identity is both God and man related

to each other. All that was the subject and theological fodder for the first great church

councils in their creeds that have, for the most part, come to define

Christian orthodoxy. But theologians didn't all then hang up their scholarly hats and sail off

to a tropical aisle to lounge in beach chairs and sip fruit drinks with little umbrellas.

They kept on theologizing and theologizing and then theologizing some more.

They made a list of all of the things that people wondered about related to the faith and went

in search of answers. When they ran out of questions, they started making up new ones about

things that people had not been wondering over. Like, how many angels can

dance on the head of a pin? Why would an angel want to dance on the head of a pin? How big a pin's

head should be? You get the idea. This period of theology began in the 12th century as part of

medieval theology and is known as Scholasticism.

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