Is Christianity really monotheistic?

What is the true nature of the threefold aspect of the Trinity? Three persons in a deeply undifferentiable relationship of love which Bulgakov called Sophia? Or three spheres of action of the One God, which was declared heretical and made anathema under the guise of modalism?

Monotheism arose in the Jewish culture and has very deep connections with both the Egyptian and Persian monotheistic heresis of Akhenaten and Zarathustra. The first was during the Exile in Egypt and possibly Joseph and the Egyptian monotheistic leaders were mutually informing each other. The second influence came during the great captivity in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. Only after this period in the history of Israel did Judaism appear and the full teaching of monotheism emerge: that is in the 500 year period before the birth of Christ.

Why did this happen? At one level it could be seen as a necessary corrective impulse to the more decadent forms of polytheism that were appearing in the region at the time. It may intially not have been an impulse or teaching that wanted to deny the workings of the spiritual heirarchies and elemental beings in nature but wanted to maintain within that culture an awareness of the one unifying undiferentiated form giving divinity that comes through the sun.

History has made us believe or accept an either-or in this debate. Is that really how the world works? Maybe it is both! We can accept an all pervaiding primal divinty that works in a threefold way, but in collaboration with the deities and spiritual beings who we can also accept in their workings in the world.

Maybe we need to create a polytheistic monotheism or a Pagan Christinaity.

And what of God’s Feminine Nature? How does Sophia play a role in salvific history?

Posted by Martin Samson