In my promissory note, I promised to talk about the 3 monotheistic religions, the 3 christian solutions to polytheism, and the Trinity. As usual, the difficulty lies in where to begin, so let me jump in the middle and if we do not drown, we will be smarter.
 
There is a peculiar thing about these religions, and that is their attitude toward language. If you want to be a Muslim scholar, you must learn Arabic, the language of the Quran, for no one would allow translations to be substituted for the holy words of Mohammed. Likewise, if you want to be a Jewish rabbi, you must learn Hebrew, for no one could imagine a rabbi unable to read the Torah. And if you want to be an Orthodox (Greek or Russian), you must learn Greek, for not only is the New Testament written in Greek, but so are all the Church Fathers. 
 
What is this emphasis on original languages? In some earlier blogs, I point out that there is a natural tension between form and function, which is only resolved in the text. That is, Plato had his divine forms which contained all the truth, where Aristotle has his divine functions (categories) wherein truth dwelt, but language has both and neither, it has words. And whatever we may think of words, they are slippery, elusive beasts that spend at least part of their time in heaven and part on earth. So we cannot capture these beasts if we translate them in space or time, for then we have changed them into our image, and capture only our own reflection.
 
I will not here attempt a philosophy of words, or even a theology of words, except to note the opening to St John the Divine's gospel, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I imagine no blog could contain the volumes written on that verse. So instead, I will rush through to a sociology of words, what it does to us, we who use them.
 
Now knowing next to nothing about the subject, caused me to buy the complete works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, which begin sometime before WWII, and are half in German. It would have helped me immensely to have read Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" before wading into his oevre, if only for the insight into the kind of sociology being debated in 1935. But what came through the small bit I have digested, is that the sociology of words form a community, that they form the absolutely essential link between the past and future, the link between actions and beliefs, between the work of Christ and man's sin. Here's a website discussing this, and a smattering of quotes:
 
So as Eugen has pointed out, language forms the bond that makes us more than individuals, that makes us a society. Perhaps in the same sense, language also forms the thought, the reasoning, the ideas that unify that society. in "I984" George Orwell popularized the concept of double-speak, the attempt by authoritarian regimes to control the thought-life of society by controlling the words. It clearly went against Orwell's morality, which begs the question, why should mere words be a matter of morality, as if words possess moral authority? And if they are authoritative, what does it say about the nature of words, in contradistinction to the things that words do, as in  Forms or Functions? 
 
But I digress. The point is that words do matter in our understanding of both Forms and Functions. This is what is recognized by Imams, Rabbis and Priests when they insist on original languages. This is why translations are not the same thing as the original. (See an excellent discussion in "The Word of God in English" by Leland Ryken.) In an earlier post I spoke about the epistemology of words, that the truth resides not in the meaning of the word, nor in the usage of the word, but in the word itself. This is what makes higher criticism empty and hollow, because it is not the supposed meaning or intent that matters, but the words.
 
And this then shapes the nature of debate about truth. When the Rabbis debated the meaning of the Torah in the Talmud, they did not accuse the other of apostasy, of mangling the intent, because it was understood that words can have ambiguous meanings. The truth is not found in the theological principle, as revealed by the words, but the truth is in the words themselves. Hence disagreements are possible and even beneficial, as long as both parties respect the text. 
 
The same can be said about the early Church Fathers, who often talked about the supra-rationality of the Trinity, that the words could not themselves be reduced to logical principles. In the Western tradition, this became the semi-mysterious notion that the Trinity was incomprehensible. But the Fathers did not mean that, and would rather have said that the Trinity was untranslatable. And therein lay the gulf between the Eastern and Western Churches.
 
For you see, ever since the 4th or 5th centuries, Latin had become the language of the Western church, so much so that St Jerome felt the need to translate the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, which later become the "inerrant scripture" of the Catholic Church. But now we come to a paradox, for if the scriptures are translated, it is no longer the words themselves which are inerrant, but the translation. And the translation is based on the content, or meaning of the thing, not the thing itself. Accordingly, the Catholic Church now put their basis, their epistemology of Truth, in the Idea, the Form, the Meaning, rather than in the Word, and reverted to a Platonic understanding of God and the Universe. In this sense then, the entire Protestant Reformation can be seen as a logical outworking of placing Truth in the Forms. One might even argue that the Enlightenment itself is a consequence of St Jerome's life work.

However, this repositioning of Truth in the Idea had many sociological as well as philosophical consequences. Now when one argued over a text, it wasn't acceptable to hold a different Idea, because that was where the Truth resided, so to disagree was to be in Error, making one's theology either orthodox or apostate, even in minor points. Thus disagreement quickly escalated and before you can say "95 Theses", both parties are excommunicating the other to hell. Which is not to say that there cannot be false teachers and apostates, but if you read the Scriptural accounts, they invariably reveal themselves apostate by what they do, not merely by theological disagreement. It is a telling observation that the Protestants distinguished themselves not only in theology, but also in piety, which even the Catholics recognized.

Am I saying that there came nothing good out of the Great Schism? No, Western Christianity has shown a dynamism that the East has never equalled. Other than the inadvertent conversion of Russia (through envoys of Vladimir the Great), evangelism has never even registered on the Orthodox radar. The consequences of this were Mohammed's mangling of Syriac Church teachings and the birth of Islam in areas dominated by the Eastern church. And there are many other examples of the impact Orthodoxy has had on science and philosophy, but the short version is that after about the 5th or 6th century, nothing has changed. And in fact, the Orthodox proclaim this as a mark of authenticity, they remain unchanged from the 6th century. One might well ask, "Why the 6th century, why not the 1st?" Which, of course, was the point of Protestantism.

So the purpose of these posts is to thread a path between the Charybdis of stasis (Orthodoxy) and the Scylla of change (Protestant), to find a safe passage for faith. Our baby step in this first post, is to note that one can disagree on the meaning of a text without being an apostate, because it is the text, not the meaning, which is infallible. In the next post, we will pursue some parallels between the Eastern view of the Trinity, and the Modernist views of the Self, in order to re-evaluate our Western understanding of the Trinity.