Of One Substance with the Father

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMuch of the church’s teaching in this age
can be summed up in one word:
Inadequate.

We have come through a dark age where
the majority of Christians
have settled
for shallow
and “dumbed down” ideas
in exchange for entertainment and cultural relevance.

Any concept that is difficult to explain
and can’t be put on a bumper sticker
gets ignored or simplified.

At the same time
we have pseudo-intellectuals
on all forms of media
spouting
some of the oldest heresies as new teaching
to promote the spirit of the age.

I hope that you have begun to recognize
that the men who wrote the Creeds
took all of this very seriously.
They were very careful
in how things were worded, and described.
And we forget a lot of history,
so I am going to recap a few important pieces here.

At the beginning of the fourth century
after the church came out from under the long persecution,
it was clear that there were many beliefs
circulating in the church.

Remember that in 325
the Bible as we know it
was not completely organized.
It would be over 100 years
before Jerome
translated the Greek into Latin
and created the first complete edition
of what we know as the Bible.
In 325 most congregations
had copies of parts of the New Testament.
Some churches had some parts,
and some churches had other parts.
The idea that one person would have
their own personal copy of the Bible
was an impossible idea.
The Gutenberg Bible was almost 1200 years into the future.

When you only have a portion of the New Testament,
you are going to miss things.
So there were churches that were like people today,
who only read one section of the Bible
and get off balance.

One important part of the Kingdom is balance.

Along with this,
many scrolls and books
were seized and destroyed during the persecutions,
so many people only knew key passages
and memorized prayers.

They knew the parts they heard during the Sunday liturgy,
and they knew the parts that were read in public,
but they were not able to go back
and get a sense of the whole picture.

And so,
there arose a number of ideas about Jesus
that tried to explain how he could be both God and man,
and how God could have suffered death and died.

Remember,
all heresy is man’s attempt to reconcile great paradoxes.

So, Jesus is a very Jewish Messiah.
He is Emet.
Emet is a Hebrew word
that contains
the first,
last,
and middle letters
of the Hebrew alphabet.

It is the word for truth.
Jesus is the Beginning and the End,
and he is both fully man and fully God.
He is the living embodiment
of the Jewish belief
that truth is two seemingly opposite positions
that are some how
held together
in tension.
He is both man and God.

But to a Greek-Western mind,
who needs principles and precepts to argue,
and truth is a set of propositions that one agrees to,
this idea is ludicrous.

How can an
immutable,
omnipotent,
omnipresent,
transcendent,
sovereign being
feel pain and die?

And so there were many versions of a basic heresy:
Jesus the Human Being must be different than Christ the God.
And the loudest of those
at the time of the Creed was Arius,
who said that Jesus became God
and that he was of a similar substance to God,
but not quite God.

At the council
the orthodox position was defended by Athanasius.
Arius and Athanasius knew each other
and were both scholars at the schools in Alexandria.

This basic heresy,
that Jesus was not fully God,
is sometimes stated this way:
Jesus was in flesh until he died,
then he became a Spirit.
His resurrection was spiritual.
Because of this we can have enlightened
spiritual experiences.
His bodily resurrection doesn’t matter.

Sometimes it is described this way:
God created Jesus
and called him the Son,
and Jesus experienced an epiphany
during life when he discovered he was God.
Because of this
he is one of the enlightened ones
like Buddha,
Confucious,
or Mohammed.

Many of these ideas come down to us
in liberal theology
and progressive or “emergent” Christianity.
(As well as the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and the Mormons).

And so the Creed makes it very clear,
through a series of
seemingly repetitive statements
the core of Biblical Truth.

I mentioned earlier that the Creed
never references Greek philosophy,
but alludes to the Bible.
These statements are all biblical,
and either come from the mouth of Jesus or the gospels.
The council wanted to make it perfectly clear what the Bible says about Jesus.

Jesus,
as I mentioned earlier,
is the Only begotten Son of God.
And as you study the creed,
you see that it is the theology written
in the Gospel of John,
and the letters of John
that have the most influence
over creed’s wording.

So this section on the nature of Jesus begins with
Begotten of his Father
before all worlds.
Jesus was there
at the very beginning
with the Father.
That’s John 2:2.

And the Creed makes it clear,
these were not two gods in a pantheon.
No,
the Father and the Son
were intrinsically related
from the beginning.