brad> But I want to focus not on advice for human sexuality but on
brad> the deep Christology. Anyone who professes the Niceaen
brad> Creed--"eternally begotten, begotten not made..."--is either
brad> committed to a (false) Aristotelian biology of reproduction or
brad> has a *lot* of rethinking to do that will end with them
brad> worshiping Mary as the eternal Mother Goddess...
There is a wide diversity of view about what it means to "profess" the Nicene Creed, of course. What kind of speech act is professing or confessing a creed? It's not very clear cut these days.
You are certainly right to link the early development of christology to the creedal formulations that came out of Nicene Council.
But, again, the same point applies here as applies to Christian doctrines about sexuality: beginning as early as the Enlightenment, and coalescing in the work of Rudolf Bultmann in the 1920s and 1930s, christology, too, has been *radically revised*, in a great many directions, by many kinds of Christian thinker, including liberation theologians, feminists, postmodernists, and so on.
There are interpretations of the Nicene Creed in which one neither takes its hellenistic metaphysical and biological assumptions literally nor ends up "worshipping Mary as the eternal Mother Goddess".
Last, it is *not* a universal practice among liberal Protestant denominations to profess the Nicene or other patristic creedal formulation. In fact, there was this guy named Luther who was rather pissy about the whole subject, a pissiness that's generally adopted by Protestants. For example, the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church doesn't list the Nicene Creed.
So, Brad, while some Christians may have the conceptual problem you suggest, it is grossly inaccurate to say the "Christian Church" as a whole does.
Best, Kendall Clark