The creed in plain words - (6) All one in Christ

We don’t need a building to be church or to worship Jesus:
A united churches open air service in rural Northamptonshire.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Words are important. It’s hard to convey our exact meaning at the best of times; using ambiguous words multiplies the risk of misunderstanding. The compilers and translators of the creed chose their words carefully. Each of these final statements uses a specific verb to amplify and apply the point they make.

We believe…

Believing in the church – a flawed, divided and sometimes corrupt institution – is a tall order! Especially when elsewhere in the creed, as in the New Testament, “believe” means “put one’s trust in”. There certainly is a sense in which the creeds, based on scripture, are trustworthy and the major but varying formularies of the churches provide a practical framework for church membership, even though they tend to emphasise the distinctive emphases of that particular denomination.

But here, “believe” doesn’t refer to a specific institution. There is one church, not many: the holy (that is, set apart by God for a purpose) catholic (that is, universal) and apostolic (that is, adhering to the teaching of the apostles revealed in the New Testament) church.

It consists of a worldwide community of believers who are united by their common faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour, regardless of our different cultures, worship styles and organisational structures. “You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus…There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28). That is the church we belong to simply by virtue of faith in Christ.

And that is something we can believe in, celebrate and commit to! We are not alone. We really are God’s new community with the shared responsibility of bringing the values of God’s Kingdom into the world by our words and deeds (look at 1 Peter 2:9). What we do in our small corner matters; it’s either a brick in the kingdom God is building, or a sledgehammer that damages it. God does not despise our small endeavours. United ministry and witness makes an even bigger impact on our community, of course, which is why the support of and co-operation with others in smaller groups, and through bodies like Churches Together, is so important.

We acknowledge…

You can acknowledge someone in the street whose name you don’t know but whose face is familiar – a near neighbour, perhaps. But here “acknowledge” means much more than a nodding acquaintance. It is a recognition of the validity and value of baptism as a sacrament, a sign of God’s promised grace. A person who is baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, no matter where (church or lake), when (adult or infant) or by what method (sprinkling or immersion), does not need to be re-baptised if they subsequently join another church. There is one baptism (Ephesians 4:5), a sign of God’s forgiveness and renewal, which we must individually, consciously and continually appropriate by faith in Christ.

We look…

It goes without saying that we want to make the most of this life, whatever our personal limitations and circumstances. But this life is just the start of an eternal adventure. The Bible tells us virtually nothing about what life after death is like, and we’re not encouraged to speculate. It is beyond human understanding or imagining. The common pictures of clouds, of angels with harps, of heaven as an unending “service” of worship, are less than helpful. Heaven, or the new creation, is a renewal of all that is good in this life and made so much more better than we can possibly imagine. We are encouraged to look forward with hope and trust in an infinite God who makes all things new and does all things well. We are not encouraged merely to hope for the best.

Seeing our current circumstances in an eternal context, recognising that God has long-term purposes for us and our family, community and world which we can never fully appreciate, can help us to face the challenges of today positively and even reduce the anxiety they may otherwise generate.

Think and talk

1.  Look at how Paul, writing towards the end of his life under house arrest in Rome sees this life in the context of eternity: Philippians 1:20-27 and 3:7-16. Ask yourself if you share this perspective, and how you might increase it.

2.  God’s creation and provision for human beings began as a garden (Genesis 2:4-17) and is renewed as a city (Revelation 21). What does that tell you about the way God takes and uses what we do? How might that encourage you (a) to take seriously the call to build “the Kingdom of God” and (b) to think about the true nature of life after death?  

3.  Paul says that the body of Christ (the church) has many parts and each has an important function. Look up and list the parts he identifies (Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12:27-31; Epohesians 4:11-14). What is your function in the universal church, and what might be the function of your local church community?

4.  The debate about forms of baptism and the age at which it can be administered has been the cause of church splits in the past.

 

This is the final post in a series on the creed that was originally prepared for a church magazine and has been expanded here. It may be reproduced locally for personal and group use with due acknowledgement to the author and this website. Future posts will revert to fulfilling more closely the aim of “Gentler Word” to consider current issues and especially personal attitudes to people and situations.

© Derek Williams 2015

 

 

The creed in plain words - (4) The everlasting presence

This oak has seen and will see many human generations.
Use such images as a reminder that Jesus lived,
and will live, for ever. 

On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

“My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known…friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future when they die.”¹ The writer A.N.Wilson has long had an on-off relationship with Christianity and his theology is hardly orthodox (he has just written a strange book on the Bible), but his experience highlights a truth that will not go away: Jesus lives.

This section of the creed is like a cereal variety pack; three different ideas united in a single brand: Jesus is alive and active for ever. The resurrection is the core of practical Christian faith. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile,” wrote St Paul (1 Corinthians 15:17). It reminds us we are not alone in the universe and it gives us hope for the future.

If Jesus was God in human form, the creator and sustainer of all life, then almost by definition he had to defeat death. God is the author of life; “he gives all people life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:25). Whatever human beings did to his incarnate body, they could not destroy the (in his case) immortal spirit that animated it. His resurrection was even hinted at in the scriptures which his disciples at the time didn’t understand, and he told them often enough that it would happen (e.g. Matthew 16:21; they didn’t understand or, frankly, believe that, either).

The nature of his risen body is unclear and there have been many suggestions as to what happened to his bones. Interestingly, his tomb never became a place of pilgrimage as happened with saints in later years; everyone at the time knew that the body really had gone. St Paul directly addresses the question, “How are the dead raised?” by suggesting that there are different kinds of “body”. The physical body, he suggests, is transformed into something different and imperishable.

In our age it isn’t so hard to understand as it might have been in the past. We know that matter cannot be destroyed but only transformed – burn something, and you turn it into energy; all the atoms that exist today existed when the earth was formed. They are just recycled into different shapes. And now quantum physicists exploring “dark matter” and sub-atomic particles have shown that what we think of as solid matter is a much looser collection of spinning atoms than hitting one’s head against a brick wall might suggest. There really are different kinds of “matter”. So the possibility that someone could be transformed into something which behaves differently to common matter (like suddenly appearing in a closed room) yet be physically visible is perfectly plausible.

Jesus’ final resurrection appearance was the “ascension”. It was a visual demonstration to the disciples that from then on Jesus would be universally available; wherever they were, he would be too. It wasn’t so much that he went “up”, as the stained glass windows love to depict, but that he went away, beyond space and time. (Going up in the world is, of course, a common idiom for going to a better place or role, and the idea was current in ancient times as well as modern.)

It also signalled the resumption of his role “at the right hand of the Father”, the place of authority over all creation. Jesus is (and always was) Lord, before whom all creation shall bow in homage and service. One day, we’ll have no choice but to do so when he “comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead”.

That will be the end of the world as we know it. And end it must, as physicists tell us, whether with a bang or a whimper. Their projected timescale is millions of years but ignores the possibility of sudden catastrophe. God’s timetable is unknown and Jesus ruled out any kind of speculation (see Matthew 24:36) although sadly that hasn’t deterred some Christians from speculating to the point of causing major church divisions. In any case, we don’t know when our personal residence on earth will end, as accident and disease as well as old age take their toll. But with our death the opportunity to encounter the living Christ on earth also ceases. What happens after that is covered in a later clause of the creed.

Meanwhile, a person’s relationship with the risen Christ on earth can be a foretaste of the future experience of eternity, and therefore well worth working at and developing (see John 10:10). Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas and funerals.

Think and talk  

1.  Look up and meditate on the verses quoted above. What can you learn about the nature of life from them?

2. Jesus has promised to be with us for ever For what purpose? Matthew 28:20; John 14:18-19; Hebrews 4:14-16, 7:25, 13:8. How does that make you feel?

3. What difference should his constant presence make to the way I conduct myself each day?

Reference

1.  Quoted by Alison Morgan, The Word on the wind, Monarch 2011, p.102.
 
© Derek Williams 2015

The material in these posts may be freely reproduced for private and small group study, with due acknowledgement.

 

The creed in plain words: (2) Jesus is who he said he was

The ascension of Jesus depicted in a church window
in Edith Weston, Rutland

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.

If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. That is really what this huge mouthful of theological shorthand is saying, although historically it was crafted for a different reason.

The early church struggled to define the nature of Christ (and hence the relationships within Trinity). Some people (called Docetists) said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Others (later called Adoptionists) claimed that a human being was “adopted” by God as his Son. Some settled for Christians believing in two gods (after all, much of the rest of the then known world was polytheistic). Even today Jehovah’s Witnesses may claim that orthodox Christians believe in three gods. The rest struggled to maintain the difficult (and orthodox) view that Jesus was a unique being who was both fully God and fully human at the same time.

We can’t comprehend it, of course, but the closer we can get to expressing it may help us to enter more fully into the practical riches of faith. The early church wrestled with words like person, substance and matters came to a head in the fourth century AD when Arius reverted to the belief that Jesus wasn’t fully God. He was opposed by theologians such as Athanasius and the Nicene Creed was the result as the church officially took the both/and view.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Disputes about words continued and in the fifth century the eastern churches wanted to stress that Jesus had one whole nature, not two (divine and human). Western churches begged to differ and a split resulted. That split might be on the way to healing. In 2014 an “Accord” was reached between Anglicans and representatives of eastern Orthodox churches. It stated that “Christ has one incarnate nature” that contains “two natures distinguished in thought alone”.¹ So that’s clear, then.

Fully God

Back to the Nicene Creed, which stresses (at length!) that Jesus is fully God. This is what really matters and which can make a big difference to personal faith. Jesus is worthy of spiritual worship as God, not merely hero worship as a great man. The term “Son” differentiates Jesus from the Father but doesn’t imply that he is an offspring. He has existed for as long as the Father existed; long before he emerged from Mary’s womb, long before the Big Bang. He’s not like the children of the mythical Greek gods.

There is only one God, comprising three persons (the third appears later in the creed). So Jesus is “one Being with the Father”: the same God who is revealed to and experienced by us in different ways. Any analogy is flawed, but for most of us any analogy is probably better than none. So for example I am a son, a father, and a husband (and several other things too). I appear or act differently in each role, but I am still fully “me” in each “person”.

The Trinity is important for two reasons. First, it tells us that God is multi-dimensional. Like a ball, we can see all sides of God in one glance. Like a multi-faceted diamond, we see God from different angles at different times and each one sparkles with colour and surprise – but none can be taken in isolation but seen as part of the whole. And secondly, God is a “community” in himself. He does not exist in splendid isolation; he was never so lonely that he had to create humans to keep him company but did so out of love and a desire to share his riches; and he is a model for human community: unity in diversity.

The creed labours the point about Jesus’ divinity. Jesus was eternally “begotten, not made”. The word is important. What we beget is the same nature as ourselves: our children are human, not less than human. Jesus was God, not less than God. What we make, like a home or a model, has a different nature; God made the universe and it is separate from God, it has a different nature. On earth Jesus claimed to be equal with God even though he was in certain ways distinct from the Father. Ultimately that was why he was crucified. Occasionally of course he demonstrated divine powers through his miracles, and his true nature was most clearly seen in the transfiguration and resurrection.

C.S. Lewis put it memorably in Mere Christianity: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”²

And that is the relevance of this theological complexity. Jesus really is the human face of God; the creator who became one of his own creatures; the author who took the lead role in his own drama; the king who allowed himself to be his own subject. So when we want to know what God is like, Jesus is the image to focus on. For a creator to become a creature – to descend from the sublime to the subordinate – in order to help the rest of creation out of the hole it had dug for itself is by any standard an extreme action that can only be described as love, especially when it resulted in God experiencing the full horror of a painful and undeserved judicial murder at the hands of the very people he came to help.

Think and talk

1.  What do these passages tell us about Jesus’ pre-existence before he was born as a human being? John 1:1-5, 8:54-59; Colossians 1:15-17.

2.  What do these passages tell us about Jesus’ claim to be fully equal with God? Matthew 26:63-64; Luke 22:66-71; John 5:18, 10:30, 14:6-11; Philippians 2:5-7; Colossians 1:18-20; Hebrews 1:1-3.

3.  References to the Trinity as such are rare in the New Testament (it took centuries for people to even start to get their heads round it). Each “Person” is seen as acting in a specific way. But there are a few places where all three are mentioned as acting in a co-ordinated manner. What might these tell us about how God works in our lives? Matthew 28:19-20; John 14:23-26; 2 Corinthians 13:13-14; Ephesians 2:17-18, 4:4-6; Revelation 1:4-6. Notice too ow they work together in Romans 8:1-39.

4.  Why do you think we always want to bring God down to our level and size rather than embrace the mystery of a multi-dimensional God who is beyond human understanding? How might this limit our view and experience of God?

References

1.  Reported in The Times, 1 November 2014

2.  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Fontana books 1973, pp.52f

 

© Derek Williams 2015

 

 

The creed in plain words: (1) The nature of God

"You created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb"
(Psalm 139:13) - an example of God's powerful attention to detail

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

The Irish comedian Dave Allen used to end his shows with the pay-off line “May your god go with you”. He wasn’t implying that there are many actual gods but rather suggesting that each person fashions an image of God according to personal taste. He was partly right.

“No-one has ever seen God,” John 1:18 reminds us, before claiming that Jesus has made God known. Because God is unseen he is beyond our imagination, and human imagination can run riot. We need a framework of understanding if our faith and life is to be authentically Christian, and not a pick and mix bag of hopeful ideas or a caricature which is easy for others to dismiss.

The ancient Nicene Creed based on New Testament teaching, provides such a framework which we shall explore here over the next few months.

One God…the Almighty

Almost every people group in history has had a “faith” in supernatural powers; most have believed in many gods. The ancient Jews were an exception. They believed in one supreme God (although they struggled to maintain it; neighbouring religions with many gods offered great attractions). So they had to be reminded regularly that “I am the first and the last, apart from me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6) and that home-made “idols” were worse than useless.

“Almighty” means all-powerful, an important encouragement for the struggles of daily life. It is illustrated in the Bible by two major events. At the Exodus God assisted a down-trodden group of people to escape slavery and begin a nation through whom he planned to show his purposes to the world. (Unfortunately, they didn’t always live up to their calling.)

And secondly in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ God demonstrated his power by opening up a new way for human beings to relate to God personally. But as powerful as God is, he is not a bully; he never forces his ways on anyone. He is not an uninvited meddler in or manipulator of human affairs. He does not automatically snuff out suffering and evil. Instead he waits for us to willingly associate ourselves with him. Loving power is also patient. Pope John Paul once said that “There is one source of power that is stronger than every disappointment, bitterness or ingrained mistrust, and that power is Jesus Christ, who brought forgiveness and reconciliation to the world.”

The Father

Dave Allen’s line was marginally better than the catchphrase of Star Wars: “May the force be with you”. God is personal, not a force. A force cannot love or choose, but a person can. “God so loved the world that he gave…” (John 3:16); a blind force cannot love or willingly give, but a person can. A force cannot communicate with people, but a person can. Human language is limited, though. “Person” is the nearest we can get to describing one who is (in C.S. Lewis’ words) “beyond personality”. We faintly reflect God’s personality; we have not projected ours onto him.

Generally, God is described as “he”. But God has no gender. We have no word in English to describe personality that isn’t gender-specific. Jesus taught his followers to regard God as a caring “Father”, with whom they could have a real personal relationship. “Father” is used because God sows the seed from which everything else – our life and personality included – springs. Not surprisingly, you will find places in the Bible where God displays what we would call “feminine” characteristics as well.

It’s not God’s fault that some people have used this as an excuse for excessive male dominance in the world, instead of developing and valuing the gender partnership which God intended when he created human beings.

Maker of all

Interpreters of Charles Darwin (and some Christians) have a lot to answer for because of the confusion they have created by pitting “science” against “religion”. The Christian doctrine of creation simply claims that everything that exists owes its origin to God. It is a statement of faith which can neither be proved nor disproved. The alternative to divine creation is blind chance. Many find “chance” unbelievable when faced with the complexity of sub-atomic particles and microscopic organisms, living, thinking humans and the rhythmic patterns of the planets.

For example, no-one knows how many stars like the sun exist in our galaxy, the Milky Way; estimates vary from 100 to 300 billion. And the Milky Way is only one of maybe 200 billion galaxies in the universe. At the other end of the scale, if all your veins and blood vessels were lain end to end they would stretch for 60,000 miles. And every second your body makes 17 million new red blood cells.

You can’t prove that God exists from observing our amazingly complex universe. But if you accept that God does exist, then examples like this from the natural world provide one picture of what he is like: powerful enough to set stars in space, yet caring enough to give attention to tiny details on earth.

Biblical poets don’t worry about how God fashioned everything. The account of origins in Genesis is more about the nature of God than the method of creation. Bible writers simply reckon that if God is powerful enough to oversee all that exists, then he’s powerful enough to see us through the troubles we face in life.

Think and talk

1.  What do these passages tell us about the power of God compared with the impotence of human fabrications: Isaiah 40:9-31; 44:6-20?

2.  A “god” is what we put our hope and trust in. What today might take the central place of God in our approach to life? (See 1 Timothy 6:17,18 for one example.)

3.  How might these “feminine” characteristics of God help us to view God without a gender emphasis: Deuteronomy 32:10,11,18; Psalm 57:1; 131:1-3; Isaiah 40:11; 49:5,15; 66:12-13; Matthew 23:37?

4.  Why do you think some people feel more comfortable viewing God as a force rather than as a person?

5.  What can we learn from these passages about God’s generosity? Psalm 104:10-18; Matthew 20:1-16; Luke 11:11-13; Acts 14:16-17; 1 Timothy 6:17?

6.  What do these verses tell us about God’s presence with us? Psalm 139:1-12; Isaiah 57:15-16; Jeremiah 23:23-24; John 14:15-20; Acts 17:26-28.

 There wiil be a series of six posts on the creed, roughly one per month April--September 2015

©Derek Williams 2015