I've been reading the Gifford annotations for Chapter 3 - which I did read first - and find an alarming number of theological references, Thomas Aquinas and Arius, among others. Somehow just reading the chapter it did not seem so religiously oriented. So many people, for so many hundreds of years, have argued over how the Christian god is divided up, which parts are more divine than others, which came first and from where. Mobs ran amuk over these questions and people were burned at the stake.
Yet I think if I lived back then - I imagine myself as an artisan, skilled in some sort of handworking - I would not have cared anymore than I do now. I think it was all political, really, a question of who you felt more personally comfortable with as your bishop, for example. Many questions in Congress are equally trivial yet arouse such emotion. It was a struggle for power back then, as it is now, and all that fruitless speculation about the nature of the Holy Ghost was just an excuse to take sides.
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Just finished Chapter 3 myself - I'm reading without any notes, so it all makes very little sense to me!
http://bit.ly/z4vYN
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