Theological Hair-Splitting
B.B. Warfield put it well, I think:-
‘Gibbon…made himself merry, or made himself miserable, as the case may have been, over the spectacle of Christianity split to its foundations in violent dispute over a mere diphthong – whether Christ should be said to be homo-ousios or only homoi-ousios with God: whether that is, he should be conceived as all that God is, or only in some greater or less degree, more or less like God. The whole substance of Christianity was involved, however, in this controversy; the issue was nothing less than whether the world should be Christian or heathen. To represent it as a dispute over a “minor detail”, a mere diphthong, were as sensible as to say that as “gold” and “god” differ in but a single letter, it cannot be of importance whether we serve God or mammon.’
(Selected Shorter Writings I, 366f)