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personality. Every mind must express itself, for activity is the very nature of mind....Thus
John speaks of the 'Word' that was with God, and was Divine, to express his conviction
that God has ever been Active and Revealing Mind. God, by His very nature, cannot sit in
heaven and do nothing. When later in the Gospel Jesus says, 'My Father works up till now'
he is saying what the Evangelist says in the first verse of the Prologue.

"John's language is not the language of philosophical definition. John has a 'concrete' and
'pictorial' mind. The failure to understand John [in his prologue] has led many to the con-
clusion that he is 'father of metaphysical [i.e., Trinitarian] Christology,' and therefore re-
sponsible for the later ecclesiastical obscuration of the ethical and spiritual emphasis of
Jesus....The evangelist did not think in terms of the category of 'substance' -- a category
which was so congenial to the Greek mind" (ibid., pp. 707, 711).

In an illuminating article in Biblical Review J. Harold Ellens points out that titles such as
Son of God, as used at the time when the New Testament was written --

"were never meant to designate the figures to whom they were applied as divine beings.
They meant rather that these figures were imbued with divine spirit, or the Logos. The titles
referred to their function and character as men of God, not to their being God. Thinking of
a human as being God was strictly a Greek or Hellenistic notion. Thus the early theological
debates from the middle of the second century on were largely between Antioch, a center
of Jewish Christianity, on the one hand, and Alexandrian Christianity, heavily colored by
neo-Plationic speculation, on the other. For the most part, the Jewish Christians' argument
tended to be that they had known Jesus and his family and that he was a human being, a
great teacher, one filled with the divine Logos...but that he was not divine in the ontologi-
cal sense, as the Alexandrians insisted. The arguments persisted in one form or another un-
til Cyril of Alexandria's faction finally won the day for a highly mythologized Jesus of di-
vine ontological being. Cyril was capable of murdering his fellow bishops to get his way.

"By the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, this Alexandrian perspective of high
Christology was dominant but not uncontested by the Antiochian perspective of low Chris-
tology. From Nicea to Chalcedon the speculative and neo-Platonist perspective gained in
creasing ground and became orthodox Christian dogma in 451 CE. Unfortunately, what the
theologians of the great ecumenical councils meant by such creedal titles as Son of God
was remote from what those same titles meant in the Gospels. The creeds were speak-
ing in Greek philosophical terms: the gospels were speaking in Second Temple Judaism
terms....The Bishops of the councils should have realized that they had shifted ground from
Hebrew metaphor to Greek ontology and in effect betrayed the real Jesus Christ."

It is not difficult to understand that the Bible is abandoned when fundamental terms like
Son of God are given new and unbiblical meanings. The Church Councils under the influence of
Greek speculative neo-Platonism replaced the New Testament Son of God with a God the Son
fashioned by philosophy. When a different meaning for a title is substituted for the original a new
faith is created. That new faith became "orthodoxy." It insisted on its dogmas, on pain of excom-
munication and damnation (the Athanasian Creed). Nicean dogmatic "orthodoxy" lifted Jesus out of
his Hebrew environment, twisted John's Gospel in an effort to make John fit into "orthodoxy's"

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