The Christian Vanguard

I've had some exchanges with Coptic Orthodox folk, and though the discussions had can be very technical and abstract, sometimes what they claim can be easily shown to be false (or true). I had the opportunity to show that one claim made to me was clearly false. A Coptic sent me a picture of a footnote that reads, "Even miaphysite expressions of one nature in Christ, correctly used, were now declared orthodox, in Canon 8 of the Council of Constantinople of 553." Here is the screenshot in its entirety, so you may know that I'm not misquoting it, and so that you know that this is published out there somewhere.  So, being an interesting, and easily verifiable, claim, I looked up the Canons. Here is what Canon 8 declares.  If anyone uses the expression "of two natures," confessing that a union was made of the Godhead and of the humanity, or the expression "the one nature made flesh of God the Word," and shall not so understand those expressio...

I wrote the following for a class assignment. It deals with Book 2, Chapter 1 of the Physics. Footnotes are omitted.  Aristotle’s line of thought is that some things exist by nature and by nature he means that which has an internal principle of change. This principle is to be found within the thing itself and not in an accidental attribute. One account of nature says that the matter which constitutes the thing is what the nature should be identified as. Antiphon, a proponent of this view, points out the wood of a bed is the nature of a bed since if you were to plant the wood of the bed what would sprout is not another bed but wood. Since nature tends to produce more of itself, and wooden beds do not produce other wooden beds but only wood, the bed is only an accidental attribute of the wood. Those who wish to identify nature with the form point out that matter considered by itself is only a potential, and doesn’t exist until it receives some form to inform it to be the kind of...