We now move on to the next section of the Creed, proclaiming our faith in Jesus. The Apostles’ Creed has, simply,
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary...
while the Nicene Creed has a whole paragraph before we get to the birth of Jesus:
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. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven. by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary...
At a very simple level, you could ask the question, ‘If Jesus is God, was there no God in Heaven when Jesus was on earth?’ The answer to this for the early Christians came partly form the Old Testament, which already had references to the Word, who was with God from the Creation onwards, in Proverbs (Ch 8) for example.
John’s gospel also starts with the statement about the Word —’In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God’.
This accords with the message in the letter to the Colossians (1: 15 ff).: ‘The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible ... He is before all things, and in him all things hold together’.
Combining that with Jesus’ own words that he was the Son of God, we have the concept of God, our Father in Heaven, who sent the Word, his Son, to be born as a man and become our Saviour.
Nevertheless, for those for whom ‘One God’ was the core of their belief, incarnation produced various challenges. This was not made any easier with the Roman belief in deities, whom people were expected to worship. As one critic said of Christians who refused to do so, “If these men worshipped no other God but one, they would have a valid argument against the others. But they worship to an extravagant degree this man [Jesus] who appeared recently, and yet think that it is not inconsistent with monotheism if they also worship his servant”.
Have you wrestled with what it means to say that Jesus was fully human and fully divine? Certainly in the early centuries of Christianity the ancient Fathers did! There were debates about the origin of the Word (later Son) and of the nature of their relationship with God. Those who lost the argument were branded heretics!
Unsurprisingly as they were dealing with mysteries of belief, heresies started to proliferate, and Arianism, one of the most dominant of them, questioned whether Jesus was divine at all. The Creed was formulated to settle these arguments definitively for the Church.
So, when we say , or even glaze over, that long paragraph in the Nicene Creed, we acknowledge that Jesus (the Word) was always one with God: eternally begotten, not made, implying oneness with God and equality between Father and Son; the Son being of the ‘same substance‘ as the Father (or as we used to say, consubstantial and co-eternal with God).
It is also worth our noting each time we say the Creed that the Son is the [visible] image, or icon, of the invisible God (Col. 1); It is through him that we begin to know the nature of God.
Comments