Contrary to the ease and delight I found in reading Athanasius, I found St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ On God and Christ to be very difficult to get through and had to put the book down numerous times in order to take mental breaks. Although it has been said that Gregory is a prose artist in the original Greek, the English translation loses this appeal and thrusts the work into the realm of virtual incomprehensibility.

The startling discovery was that a reader must read Gregory with the same care that an explosives technician puts into following his recipe for destruction. Just as one wrong combination of ingredients leads to the death of the bomb maker, a normal-paced reading of Gregory leads the reader to intellectual complacency. Without extreme care, the reader finds himself in a vicious circle back where he started having no further understanding of the subject matter than he did before the reading, having only the passage of time to show for the experience.

Even when our mind correctly interprets the puzzle of Gregory’s words, our understanding of the material is still hindered by its contextual ontology. We are faced with the sorry realization that the concepts in Gregory’s time are not the same as concepts in our time and what may seem heretical by our standards were just ways of expressing correct theological interpretations based upon a pre-psychological epistemology. So, even when we finally fully understand Gregory, we don’t. Correct understanding of Gregory seems as simple as trying to swim across a lake of molasses with your hands and feet bound and your waist strapped to either a Yugo or a John Deere tractor, depending on your pre-existent familiarity with early church history.

With all of that being said, I understand that Gregory had a wonderful impact on Christian history and that his writings are works of art in the original language and are difficult to translate for this reason. I believe there is much value in reading Gregory in the translated form however difficult it may be. People do all sorts of bizarre things.

When God created the Earth, He created a perfect Earth and perfect man. He gave man rules in which man was supposed to live by. This included not eating from the tree which gave the knowledge of good and evil. God revealed that the consequence of this action was death. When the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were tempted by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they disobeyed the decree of God and ate from the tree. This act of disobedience transformed man, who was created perfect, into an imperfect being and forced the wrath of the Creator who, being the epitome of good, necessarily was forced to keep His original decree, thus causing man to incur death rather than God’s plan of eternal existence. Since the two origins of man’s existence, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were now imperfect and sinners, all of their offspring and the generations to come will inherit this sinful affliction; this disease of imperfection.

How could the beings God created not be perfect? How could God create something that “goes bad’? The answer is quite simple: in order for humans to be perfect they must choose good rather than evil. God always chooses goodness because He, being the embodiment of goodness, cannot choose otherwise, but what about His creatures? Which is the more “perfect” creature, one who is forced to choose goodness, programmed as one would program a computer, or one who, given the choice, chooses to do good? To put it another way, which has a greater existence and is thus more perfect in being, the computer I am typing this paper on or Mother Theresa? Also, since God wanted to have a relationship with His creation, we were given this free will to satisfy the requirements of true fellowship. Who is a greater “friend”, the slave, required to do the master’s choice without any freedom, or the brother, submitting to the choice of his brother because of the love he has for him?

But man, who was not a slave, in an exercise of this free will, chose to rebel as a slave would rebel against his master and, in doing so, became imperfect and a slave to death itself. God, however, in His original desire and plan for His humanly creatures to have eternal existence, devised a plan in which the fallen man would be able to again rise to their intended purpose. This required redemption of our sinful nature by a perfect man but, since there were no longer any perfect men, this could only be accomplished by God himself, in the form of the second Person of the Trinity becoming a man and giving His life as payment for this original sin in the Person of Jesus Christ.

The person of Jesus was fully man and fully God. Jesus, because of His divine nature, never sinned and, being born without a human father, never inherited original sin, so was able to be the required perfect sacrifice for the salvation of humanity. There have been many suggestions as to how Jesus could be both fully man and fully God as the same time but many of them have included heretical teachings and led to many councils, where scholars have attempted to define the Biblical teachings on this existence. These councils were intended more to stop the spread of heresies than to define the Bible. The Biblical teaching was and is clear; human understanding cannot be. It is impossible for the finite human mind to fully understand the infinite God but oversimplifications of the Biblical teachings in an attempt to explain them, although intended for good, can turn out to warp the original teaching. Such was the case of the heresies the councils intended to refute.

When the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, the second perfect man to ever live, died on the cross, He paid the price for our inherited corruption. One perfect man sinned causing future generations to be imperfect; another perfect man paid the price, allowing future generations to have perfection once again. But the acts of the Incarnation and Atonement did not automatically grant forgiveness to each and every man. To receive this gift from above, all one must do is to believe in it. The acceptance of this gift, however, proves the most difficult choice one could make. In fact, many would rather spend their lifetimes denying this gift than coming to the reality of it. Some would even quote fictional stories and fabricate others in an attempt to be able to “factually” deny this claim.

The Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, has all of the divine aspects of God, since He is God. The role of the Holy Spirit is to mainifest the active presence of God in the world and in the church. It is the Holy Spirit that leads the unbeliever to Christ. It is the Holy Spirit that regenerates the new believer more and more into the likeness of Christ each and every day. It is through the Holy Spirit that God accomplishes His shaping of believers in the church today.

The Holy Spirit gives life, power for service, purifies, reveals, gives evidence of God’s presence, guides and directs God’s people, provides a Godlike atmosphere, gives us assurance that we are children of God, teaches and illumines, and unifies. With such a long list, one may wonder what the Holy Spirit does not do. Since the Holy Spirit is God’s current presence in the world, taking the place of Christ when He ascended into heaven, it is through the Holy Spirit that the current believer is able commune with God the Father, in the name of the savior, Jesus Christ.

Whether the Holy Spirt is drawing an new believer to Christ or changing a believer into a person who is more Christlike, the Holy Spirit always points to the second Person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, in turn, always points to the Father. The Holy Spirit never draws attention to Himself but always points attention toward Jesus. The Holy Spirit, although God’s active force in the world today, should not be over-emphasized or placed above either the Father or the Son.

God has given us information of who He is through two different sources: special revelation and general revelation. Special revelation is a specific and direct message to us. The most obvious example of special revelation is the Bible. General revelation, just like its name implies, is more general. This is the entirety of creation. By looking at creation we get to understand the Creator.

When the inspired biblical authors use nature to illustrate the spiritual life the purpose is two-fold. First, there is the surface analogy – like the imagery of Christ as a slaughtered lamb. Second, there is truth about God to be found in the created object being referenced. We can learn something about God by studying the lamb itself – its biology, behavior, and interaction with the rest of the created order. All of this tells us something about God, whether it is the precision of His creation, the complexity of His creation, the order of His creation, etc.

Since both general revelation and special revelation have the same Author they will never contradict each other. We learn more specific details about who God is through the Bible, but nothing we ever discover about the world will contradict it or vice-versa. Through both the analogies of nature and nature itself we learn about God.