Of One Substance with the Father

Much 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.