Filioque, a problem for the Eastern and Western Church (3)

Oneness of God, as a result of the insertion "Filioque", became nonidentical with hypostasis of the Father, but identical in essence or substance of the one God. Thus, the unity of God was no longer to-One's Personal, but the One who is not an impersonal. Herein lies the problem. Meanwhile, the Eastern churches in accordance with the Scriptures affirm that God is one, because the Father are one. Thus, the unity of God in the teachings of the Eastern Churches is the One of a personal nature. Only God is the one Personal God; that teaching from the Bible and that is also teaching the Eastern churches. Whereas in the Western Church of the One God is the essence of God is one. It is Greek philosophy, and that evidence of Hellenization that occurred in the Western Church. The Bible teaches God is personal and not the absolute existence (essence) that without the personal.

Eastern churches teach that salvation has been the result of merging with the Divine Human in Personal the Christ that one, by the Incarnation. So humans are called to "take part in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Take part in the divine nature or "theosis" occurs because the alliance between the human person with a Personal God through the work of Jesus Christ. If the unity of God is the essence, the human community and God is no longer an alliance between the private individual, but the alliance or united with the essence of God, allied with the Essence-nature of God. Because only God himself who has Essence-nature of God or the essence of God, the man who allied themselves with God's essence and then have the essence of God and that means people become God himself. It became like teaching "pure Pantheism", a form of mysticism that can not be accepted by the Eastern Churches.

Western Church (Roman Catholic and Protestant) are often accused the eastern churches which teach mysticism pantheistic essence of God and the human essence melt into one as a result of rejection filioque inserts. Yet strangely, it was such a mystic, which disrupt the essence of God with the human essence, does not occur in the Eastern Churches, but occurred in the West for example in the case of Meister Eckhard, the Quakers (Society of Friends), Anabaptis, Black-Pentecostalism other. Rejection of the insertion of the word Filioque in the Nicene Creed by the Eastern Church precisely to prevent the entry of a false spiritualism mysticism as in the case of the groups mentioned above.

READING LIST
- Lukas Vischer (editor); Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ (Geneva, 1981)
- Philip Sherard; Church, Papacy and Schism (London, 1978)
- Ronald Robertson CSP, The Eastern Christian Churches (Rome, Edizioni Orientalia Christiana, 1999)
- Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1993)