Nestorianism

Convincing families was an uphill battle in a society where girls were married off young, often subjected to harsh treatment, and where literacy for women was viewed as disgraceful.

Eventually, a breakthrough came when a Nestorian bishop presented two girls to Fidelia with the solemn assurance, These be your daughters, and no man shall take them from you.

More girls soon followed, many unkempt and ignorant of basic hygiene.

yet each was a precious soul for whom Fidelia labored patiently.

Exhaustion became a constant companion, and at one point so weary was she that she struggled to sit through a service until a woman sitting behind her offered support and encouragement.

Eventually worn out and unable to recover her strength, Fidelia returned home to Massachusetts, where she died in 1864, aged 47.

Her passing was mourned by many, including the Nestorian girls she had taught.

One wrote from Persia to America, asking sorrowfully, Is there another Miss Fisk in your country? Fidelia Fisk's legacy is that of a pioneer who broke cultural barriers, devoted her life to the education and spiritual nurture of Persian girls, and planted seeds of faith in a land resistant to change, reflecting a love that was truly Christlike.

That feels about right to me, yeah.

Nicholas Bonanfield is next, who says, John MacArthur didn't understand the hypostatic union and was a Nestorian.

Have you ever heard this before, Bicellar Hold?

I have never even heard this, so I'm going to sell because I'm going to have to study this one.

But he was a human person.

Nestorianism held that Jesus was a human person and a divine person united together.

It's like split personality disorder.

But the church, all of these people are really well-meaning people, right? They're wrestling with the question.

A treatise against Eutyches and Nestorius.

a treatise against eutyches and nestorius by anisius manlius severinus boethius most honourable of the illustrious order of ex consuls patrician to his saintly master and reverend father john the deacon his son boethius i have been long and anxiously waiting for you to discuss with me the problem which was raised at the meeting but since your duties have prevented your coming and i shall be for some time involved in my business engagements i am setting down in writing what i had been keeping to say by word of mouth you no doubt remember how when the letter was read in the assembly it was asserted that the eutychians confess that christ is formed from two natures but does not consist of them whereas catholics admit both propositions for among followers of the true faith he is equally believed to be of two natures and in two natures struck by the novelty of this assertion i began to inquire what difference there can be between unions formed from two natures and unions which consist in two natures for the point which the bishop who wrote the letter refused to pass over because of its gravity seemed to me of importance and not one to be idly and carelessly slowed over on that occasion all loudly protested that the difference was evident and that there was no obscurity confusion or perplexity and in the general storm and tumult there was no one who really touched the edge of the problem much less any one who solved it i was sitting a long way from the man whom i especially wished to watch and if you recall the arrangement of the seats i was turned away from him with so many between us that however much i desired it i could not see his face and expression and glean therefrom any sign of his opinion personally indeed i had nothing more to contribute than the rest in fact rather less than more i no more than the others had any view about the question at issue while my possible contribution was less by one thing namely the false assumption of a knowledge that i had not got i was i admit much put out and being overwhelmed by the mob of ignorant speakers i held my peace fearing lest i should be rightly set down as insane if i held out for being sane among those madmen so i continued to ponder all the questions in my mind not swallowing what i had heard but rather chewing the cud of constant meditation at last the door opened to my insistent knocking and to the truth which i found cleared out of my way all the clouds of the eutychian era and with this discovery a great wonder came upon me at the vast temerity of unlearned men who use the cloak of impudent presumption to cover up the vice of ignorance for not only do they often fail to grasp the point at issue but in a debate of this kind they do not even understand their own statements forgetting that the case of ignorance is all the worse if it is not honestly admitted i turn from them to you and to you i submit this little essay for your first judgment and consideration if you pronounce it to be sound i beg you to place it among the other writings of mine which you possess but if there is anything to be struck out or added or changed in any way i would ask you to let me have your suggestions in order that i may enter them in my copies just as they leave your hands when this revision has been duly accomplished then i will send the work on to be judged by the man to whom i always submit everything but since the pen is now to take the place of the living voice let me first clear away the extreme and self-contradictory errors of nestorius and eutyches after that by god's help i will temperately set forth the middle way of the christian faith but since in this whole question of self-contradictory heresies the matter of debate is persons and natures these terms must first be defined and distinguished by their proper differences first nature then may be affirmed either of bodies alone or of substances alone that is of corporeals or incorporeals or of everything that is in any way capable of affirmation since then nature can be affirmed in three ways it must obviously be defined in three ways for if you choose to affirm nature of the totality of things the definition will be of such a kind as to include all things that are it will accordingly be something of this kind nature belongs to those things which since they exist can in some measure be apprehended by the mind this definition then includes both accidents and substances for they all can be apprehended by the mind but i add in some measure because god and matter cannot be apprehended by mind be it never so whole and perfect but still they are apprehended in a measure through the removal of accidents the reason for adding the words since they exist is that the mere word nothing denotes something though it does not denote nature for it denotes indeed not that anything is but rather non-existence but every nature exists and if we choose to affirm nature of the totality of things the definition will be as we have given it above but if nature is affirmed of substances alone we shall since all substances are either corporeal or incorporeal give to nature denoting substances a definition of the following kind nature is either that which can act or that which can be acted upon now the power to act and to suffer belongs to all corporeals and the soul of corporeals for it both acts in the body and suffers by the body but only to act belongs to god and other divine substances here then you have a further definition of what nature is as applied to substances alone this definition comprises also the definition of substance for if the word nature signifies substance when once we have defined nature we have also settled the definition of substance but if we neglect incorporeal substances and confine the name nature to corporeal substances so that they alone appear to possess the nature of substance which is the view of aristotle and the adherents both of his and various other schools we shall define nature as those do who have only allowed the word to be applied to bodies now in accordance with this view the definition is as follows nature is the principle of movement properly inherent in and not accidentally attached to bodies i say principle of movement because every body has its proper movement fire moving upwards the earth moving downwards and what i mean by movement properly inherent and not accidentally attached is seen by the example of a wooden bed which is necessarily borne downward and is not carried downward by accident for it is drawn downward by weight and heaviness because it is of wood i e an earthly material for it falls down not because it is a bed but because it is earth that is because it is an accident of earth that it is a bed hence we call it wood in virtue of its nature but bed in virtue of the art that shaped it nature has further another meaning according to which we speak of the different nature of gold and silver wishing thereby to point the special property of things this meaning of nature will be defined as follows nature is the specific difference that gives form to anything Thus, although nature is described or defined in all these different ways, both Catholics and Nestorians firmly hold that there are, in Christ, two natures of the kind laid down in our last definition, for these same specific differences cannot apply to God and man.

Second, but the proper definition of person is a matter of very great perplexity, for if every nature has person, the difference between nature and person is a hard knot to unravel.

Or if person is not taken as the equivalent of nature, but is a term of less scope and range, it is difficult to say to what natures it may be extended, that is, to what natures the term person may be applied.

They have a patriarch who is very learned in the scripture.

And Rav Haigon said, someone in the Vesemadri, she's a Lydian, not just someone, I want you to go to the Nestorian patriarch and ask him, what does this verse mean? Now, let me elaborate for a minute what this means.

The

Nestorians have a Syriac

translation of the Bible called the Pshita, which is a Parvum, really the same as a very post-Aramaic.

It's a very early Aramaic translation.

It was done by Jews.

And

That's how you get...

Well, in the Far East, you had a bunch of Christian Naimans and Karaites, which were Nestorian groups.

And the Khazars are kind of a different story that I won't really go into.

But, uh,

Yeah,

because in order to understand what Kublai does, you need to understand what's going on there.

yeah so basically you have uh I'm going to say 3.5 types of religion here that really matter you do have mannequins you do have Nestorians running around but for the most part they're not big players even though some of them might claim to be so you get

that's anti-mannequin propaganda by the way all this stuff anyway