Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed
Page 4
Thine is the power; behold, I sit
In willing bonds before thy feet.
THE DIVINE LORD
Jesus, who is the Christ (says the Creed), is God’s only Son . This identifies Mary’s boy as the second person of the eternal Trinity, the Word who was the Father’s agent in making the world and sustaining it right up to the present (John 1:1-4;Colossians 1:13-20; Hebrews 1:1-3). Staggering? Yes, certainly, but this identification is the heart of Christianity. “The word of God became a human being and lived among us” (John 1:14, Phillips).
If Jesus is God the Son, our co-creator, and
is also Christ, the anointed savior-king, now
risen from death and reigning in the place of
authority and power, then he has a right to rule
us, and we have no right to resist his claim.
“Our Lord” follows straight from this. If Jesus is God the Son, our co-creator, and is also Christ, the anointed savior-king, now risen from death and reigning (sitting, as the Creed puts it, “on the right hand of God the Father almighty,” in the place of authority and power), then he has a right to rule us, and we have no right to resist his claim. As he invaded space and time in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, so he invades our personal space and time today, with the same purpose of love that first brought him to earth. “Come, follow me” was his word then, and it is so still.
Is he, then, your Lord? For all who say the Creed, this question is inescapable; for how can you say “our Lord” in church until you have first said “my Lord” in your heart?
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
Jesus—God and man:
Hebrews 1:1—3:6
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What is the significance, historically and for us today, of the name Jesus ?
What should the title Christ have meant to a waiting Jewish nation? What should it mean to us?
Why can Christ rightfully claim authority to rule your life?
A voice from the cloud said,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom
I am well pleased; listen to him.”
MATHEW 17: 5
CHAPTER 7
His Only Son
When you hear a young man introduced as “my only son,” you know he is the apple of his father’s eye. The words reveal affection. When the Creed calls Jesus God’s “only Son” (echoing “only begotten” in John 1:18; 3:16, 18, kjv), the implication is the same. Jesus, as God’s only Son, enjoys his Father’s dearest love. God said so himself when speaking from heaven to identify Jesus at his baptism and transfigura-tion: “This is my beloved Son...” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5).
FULLY GOD
Moreover, this phrase of the Creed is a bulwark against such lowering and denial of Jesus’ deity as one finds in Unitarianism and the cults. Jesus was not just a God-inspired good man. Nor was he a super-angel, first and finest of all creatures, called “god” by courtesy because he is far above men (which is what Arians said in the fourth century and Jehovah’s Witnesses say today). Jesus was, and remains, God’s only Son, as truly and fully God as his Father is. God’s will, said Jesus, is “that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23), a statement that knocks Unitarianism flat.
Jesus was not just a God-inspired good man.
Nor was he a super-angel, first and finest of all
creatures, called “god” by courtesy because he is
far above men. Jesus was, and remains, God’s only
Son, as truly and fully God as his Father is.
But is it not mere mythology to talk of a Father-Son relationship within the Godhead? No, for Jesus himself talked this way. He called God “my Father” and himself not “a” but “the Son.” He spoke of a unique and eternal Father-Son relation, into which he had come to bring others. “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27).
BEGOTTEN
“Begotten of his Father before all worlds... begotten, not made,” says the Nicene Creed. This is the language of fourth-century debate. The point of it is that though the Son lives his life in dependence on the Father, because that is his nature (“I live because of the Father,” John 6:57), he is in himself divine and eternal and is not a created being. The phrase is not suggesting that the Son originated after the Father or is in himself less than the Father.
“Begotten” in John’s phrase “only begotten” cannot signify an event in God’s past that is not also part of his present, since it is only for us creatures who live in time that momentary events exist. Time as we know it is part of creation, and its Maker is not subject to its limitations, any more than he is subject to the limitations of created space. For us, life is a sequence of moments, and future and past events (begettings or any other) are both out of reach; but to God (so we must suppose, though we cannot imagine it) all events are constantly present in an eternal Now.
So the pre-mundane “begetting” of the Son (as distinct from the temporal and metaphorical “begetting” of the king in Psalm 2:7, which is applied to Christ in Acts 13:33 and Hebrews 1:5; 5:5, and which means simply bringing him to the throne) must be thought of not as a momentary event whereby God, after being singular, became plural, but as an eternal relationship whereby the first person is always Father to the Son and the second is always Son to the Father. In the third century Origen happily expressed this thought by speaking of the “eternal generation” of the Son. This is part of the unique glory of the triune God.
MYSTERY
Formulae for the Incarnation—the Council of Chalcedon’s “one person in two natures, fully God and fully man” or Karl Barth’s “God for man, and man for God”—sound simple, but the thing itself is unfathomable. It is easy to shoot down the ancient heresies that the Son took a human body without a human soul or that he was always two persons under one skin, and with them the modern heresy that the “enfleshing” of the Son was merely a special case of the indwelling of the Spirit, so that Jesus was not God but merely a God-filled man. But to grasp what the Incarnation was in positive terms is beyond us. Don’t worry, though; you do not need to know how God became man in order to know Christ! Understand it or not, the fact remains that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14); that was the supreme, mind-blowing miracle. Love prompted it; and our part is not to speculate about it and scale it down but to wonder and adore and love and exalt “Jesus Christ... the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
Answer thy mercy’s whole design,
My God incarnated for me;
My spirit make thy radiant shrine,
My light and full salvation be;
And through the shades of death unknown
Conduct me to thy dazzling throne.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
God’s incarnate Son:
Colossians 1:13-23
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
Why is it not enough to call Jesus God-inspired, a superior angel, or even a god?
What is the significance of the fact that the Son is not a created being?
Why does facing Christianity mean facing up to Jesus Christ?
Behold, the virgin shall conceive
and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel.
ISAIAH 7: 14
CHAPTER 8
Born of the
Virgin Mary
The Bible says that the Son of God entered and left this world by acts of supernatural power. His exit was by resurrection-plus-ascension, and his entry by virgin birth, both fulfilling Old Testament anticipations (see Isaiah 7:14 for the virgin birth and 53:10-;12 for resurrection-ascension).
The entry and exit miracles carry the same message. First, they confirm that Jesus, though not less than man, was more than man. His earthly life, though fully human, was also divine. He, the co-creator, was in this world—his own world—as a visitor; he came from God and went to God.
The Fathers appealed
to the virgin birth as proof not that Jesus was truly divine as distinct from being merely human, but that he was truly human as distinct from merely looking human as ghosts and angels might do, and it was probably as a witness against docetism (as this view was called) that the virgin birth was included in the Creed. But it witnesses against humanitarianism (the view that Jesus was just a fine man) with equal force.
Second, these two miracles indicate Jesus’ freedom from sin. Virgin-born, he did not inherit the guilty twist called original sin: his manhood was untainted, and his acts, attitudes, motives, and desires were consequently faultless. The New Testament emphasizes his sinlessness (see John 8:29, 46; Romans 5:18ff.; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 7:26; 1 Peter 2:22-;24; etc.). Being sinless, he could not be held by death once his sacrifice was done.
TWO STORIES
The New Testament gives two complementary accounts of the virgin birth, evidently independent yet strikingly harmonious—Joseph’s story in Matthew 1 and Mary’s in Luke 1-2. Both show every sign of being sober history. Ancient historians, seeing themselves as artists and moralists, usually omitted reference to sources, but Luke drops a broad hint that he had received Mary’s narrative firsthand (cf. 2:51 with 1:1-3).
Matthew and Luke give two genealogies of Jesus (Matthew 1:2-17; Luke 3:23-38), which has puzzled some, but there are at least two straightforward ways of harmonizing them. Either Luke’s genealogy gives Mary’s line but starts with Joseph as Jesus’ putative father (verse 23) because it was standard practice to declare descent through males, or else Luke traces Joseph’s biological descent as distinct from the royal line of succession that Matthew appears to follow throughout. (See Professor F. F. Bruce, “Genealogy of Jesus Christ,” in The New Bible Dictionary for the details.)
SKEPTICISM
For the past century and a half skepticism about both Jesus’ virgin birth and his physical resurrection has been quite unreasonably strong. It began as part of a rationalistic quest for a non-miraculous Christianity, and though that quest is now out of fashion (and a good thing too) the skepticism lingers on, clinging to the minds of Christian people as the smell of cigarettes clings to the room after the ashtrays have been cleared. It is no doubt possible (though it is neither easy nor natural) to believe in the incarnation of the eternal, preexisting Son while disbelieving the entry and exit miracles; greater inconsistencies have been known. But it is much more logical, indeed the only reasonable course, to hold that since on other grounds we acknowledge Jesus and the Word made flesh, these two miracles, as elements in the larger miracle of the Son’s incarnate life, raise no special difficulty.
Certainly, if we deny the virgin birth because it was a miracle, we should in logic deny Jesus’ bodily resurrection too. These miracles are on a par, and it is unreasonable to accept either while rejecting the other.
Mary was a virgin until after Jesus’ birth, but later ideas of her perpetual virginity are merely fanciful. The Gospels show that Jesus had brothers and sisters (Mark 3:31; 6:3).
If we deny the virgin birth because it was a miracle,
we should in logic deny Jesus’ bodily resurrection too.
These miracles are on a par, and it is unreasonable
to accept either while rejecting the other.
“Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary” in the Creed witnesses to the reality of the Incarnation, not the glory of Jesus’ mother. The Roman Catholic Church, however, has sponsored the unhappy development of Mariolog (Mary-doctrine) among theologians and Mariolatry (Mary-worship) among the faithful. Mariology, which sees Mary as co-redeemer, rests on the non-biblical teaching that Mary, like Jesus, was born without sin (the immaculate conception) and entered resurrection glory straight after death (the assumption).
But the real Mary, the Mary of Scripture, saw herself simply as a saved sinner. “My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:47, kjv). She sets us a marvelous example, not just of the privilege (and the price!) of cooperating in God’s plan to bless the world (see Luke 1:38; 2:34-35), but also of humble response to God’s grace. Parents are slow to take things from their children, and Jesus himself commented sadly at one stage that “a prophet is not without honor except... in his own household” (Matthew 13:57); but Mary and her family, after initial disbelief (cf. Matthew 13:57; Mark 3:20ff., 31-35; John 7:3-5), came to living faith in her son (Acts 1:14). Have we learned from their example?
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
The virgin birth:
Matthew 1:1-25
Luke 1:26-56
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What do the miracles associated with Christ’s earthly entry and exit show us about him?
Do you agree that one’s attitude toward the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus should be the same?
How does the biblical picture of Mary compare with that traditionally given by the Roman Catholic Church?
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
ISAIAH 53: 6
CHAPTER 9
Suffered under
Pontius Pilate
Fancy a school of scientists or philosophers, or the members of a political party, constantly repeating that their founder was put to death by the government as a threat to law and order! Yet this is what Christians do, and the cross of Jesus is the centerpiece of the Creed. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified.” Look at these words in reverse order.
“Was crucified.” This was the standard Roman way of executing criminals. To say “Jesus was crucified” is like saying he was hanged or went to the electric chair.
PILATE
“Under Pontius Pilate.” Hitler will be remembered as the man who gassed the Jews, and Pilate, a nonentity otherwise, goes down in history as the man who killed Jesus. Under the Roman occupation, the Jewish authorities could not execute anyone; so when they had passed sentence on Jesus for confessing his true identity as God’s Savior-King, the Christ (they thought the confession blasphemous), they passed him on to the governor for action.
Pilate, having symbolically washed his hands of the matter—the goofiest gesture, perhaps, of all time—gave the green light for judicial murder, directing that Jesus, though guiltless, should die all the same to keep people happy.Pilate saw this as shrewd government; how cynical can you get?
PASSION
“Suffered.” This word carries not only the everyday meaning of bearing pain, but also the older and wider sense of being the object affected by someone else’s action. The Latin is passus, whence the noun passion. Both God and men were agents of Jesus’ passion: “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23, from Peter’s first sermon). God’s purpose at the cross was as real as was the guilt of the crucifiers.
Jesus knew on the cross all the pain, physical and
mental, that man could inflict and also the divine
wrath and rejection that my sins deserve; for he was
there in my place, making atonement for me.
What was God’s purpose? Judgment on sin, for the sake of mercy to sinners. The miscarrying of human justice was the doing of divine justice. Jesus knew on the cross all the pain, physical and mental, that man could inflict and also the divine wrath and rejection that my sins deserve; for he was there in my place, making atonement for me. “All we like sheep have gone astray... and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).
Because the sinless Saviour died
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God, the Just, is satisfied
To look on him—and pardon me.
PROPITIATION
Here we reach the real heart—the heart of the heart, we may say—of Christianity; for if the Incarnation is its shrine, the Atonement is certainly its holy of holies. If t
he Incarnation was the supreme miracle, it was yet only the first of a series of steps down from the joy and bliss of heaven to the pain and shame of Calvary (Philippians 2:5-8). The reason why the Son of God became man was to shed his blood as (in the Prayer Book’s words) “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” God “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32): that was the measure of his love (cf. Romans 5:5-8).
It is in the same terms—terms, that is, not of tolerant avuncular benevolence but of this particular precious gift—that John explains what he means by his great and glorious, but much-misunderstood, declaration, “God is love.” “In this is love,” he explains, “not that we loved God but that [when we didn’t] he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation [better, propitiation] for our sins” (1 John 4:8-10).
The cross of Christ has many facets of meaning. As our sacrifice for sins, it was propitiation (Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 4:10; cf. Hebrews 2:17)—that is, a means of quenching God’s personal penal wrath against us by blotting out our sins from his sight. (“Expiation” in the rsv rendering of these texts signifies only “a means of blotting out sins,” which is an inadequate translation.)y As our propitiation, it was reconciliation, the making of peace for us with our offended, estranged, angry Creator (Romans 5:9-11). We are not wise to play down God’s hostility against us sinners; what we should do is magnify our Savior’s achievement for us in displacing wrath by peace.