The Creed: Part 1
Alison Deighan begins a new series for The Crombie Burn Reader on the Christological statements held within the creed we repeat each Mass.
In this series Alison Deighan will look at the Christological statements of the Nicene Creed, the Creed which we confess each Sunday at Mass.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages
Jesus is described as “Lord” in many places in the New Testament. In the historical context of the Early Church, the title of “Lord” was a common one for masters and rulers, both religious and secular, demonstrating respect and honour. However, the Old Testament background of the term links it to divinity. On Mount Horeb at the burning bush, the divine name which God gives to Moses is “I Am Who Am” (Ex 2:14). The name is too sacred for repetition – even the four letters which denote the name, “YHWH” are not spoken or written down by the people of Israel or by the writers of the Old Testament Scriptures. Instead, “Adonai,” which means “Lord” in Hebrew, or “Kyrios” when translated into Greek is used. These terms are used in the Old Testament exclusively of the God of Israel- more than an honorific or title, they are used as the closest the people dare come to calling God by a proper name.
When we see Jesus referred to as “Lord” throughout the New Testament Scriptures, and in the other writings of the Early Church, this is an indication that he was recognised and worshipped as God by his earliest followers. We see this throughout the Scriptures – for example, St Thomas’ declaration of faith, “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28) in the risen Christ, and St Paul’s identification of faith in Christ as salvific: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). Paul also says that the Lordship of Jesus is what the apostles preach: “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor 4:5). The confession, “Jesus is Lord” appears in several places in Scripture, notably in Paul’s writings, and scholars have suggested that it is an early proclamation of faith in the divinity of Christ, a small proto-Creed – a form of words which expresses that the person confessing it shares the Church’s belief in the truth it conveys.
The title “Son of God” is used in a variety of ways in the Old Testament. The Catechism of the Catholic Church at paragraph 444 discusses how the term is used of persons who have a connection with God- angels, kings, the people of Israel- and how it signifies an adoptive relationship, a kinship and intimacy between God and creatures. None of these relationships of course involve any creature sharing the divine nature. The New Testament is full of indications that the Sonship of Jesus is something other than this adoptive relationship. Jesus refers most often to God as “my Father,” expressive of an intimacy and familiarity which none of the prophets had dared to claim. He claims a unique relationship with the Father, “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27). John’s Gospel is full of indications of the uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship, but a passage which has been particularly significant for the later development of the Church’s thinking about the nature of Christ is the identification of Jesus as the “only-begotten Son” in John’s Prologue- “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father” (Jn 1:14).
The early Fathers of the Church went on to ponder and explain further about what it means when the Church professes that Jesus is the “only-begotten Son.” As was usual in the development of the Church’s understanding of Christ, this revolved around finding a way to express the faith that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human. In the first three centuries of the Church, some of the errors which developed involved a denial of the divinity of Christ. The adoptionist heresy began with a group known as the Ebionites, who came from a Jewish background. Like many heresies, their error sprang from a desire to preserve an important truth and ended in the denial of another – in this case, the truth of the Oneness of God, so central to the Jewish tradition. The Ebionites could not reconcile the truth that God is one with any notion of Jesus being more than a man, and taught that, though a man by nature, Jesus was adopted as Messiah. Later versions of the adoptionism suggested that the divine Word of God came upon the man Jesus. Although it’s an ancient heresy, we can see echoes of it today when it’s suggested that Jesus was a good man or a prophet, but not divine. Adoptionism was condemned at the Synod of Antioch in 268 AD, where the Synod Fathers maintained the uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship, and taught that the Word was divine in his own right.
A variation on the same heresy was known as modalism or Sabellianism. Arising from the same concern to preserve the unity and oneness of God, the modalists taught that the Father, Son and Spirit referred to different modes of being of the one God. In a sense, they suggested that what we would now refer to as the three persons of the Trinity are three roles played by the same actor. Whilst this recognises the full divinity of Christ, it does not recognise the distinctness of his Person, or the reality of his relationship with the Father, emptying his Sonship of real meaning. Origen of Alexandria was influential in refuting this heresy – he affirmed that the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Persons, from all eternity.
An opposite error which prevailed in the early Church is known as Docetism. This involved a rejection of the truth that God the Son truly took on flesh. The Docetists suggested that whist in Jesus God “seemed” to suffer and die, this was merely a matter of appearances, and that the flesh of Christ itself was an appearance. We could say that they, in order to accept that Christ was divine, found it necessary to neglect his humanity. As Christians after two millennia of faith, it’s easy for us to normalise something which was religiously scandalous to many in the era of the Early Church, and still is to many people today - the real association of God with the mess and confinement of embodied human life. As well as the religious scandal, there’s a related intellectual problem. By the time of the early Church, some philosophers had arrived at the idea that the divine must be perfect and unchanging in order to be really divine. If God is truly God, then he cannot move or change – change or development would imply some lack that he needs to remedy, or unfulfilled potential which he now changes in order to realise, which is inconsistent with his perfection. So how can God take on flesh without some change, when change is inconsistent with his nature? How can be made man, when the human condition, and the material world in general is defined by limits and by change? There is something understandable about some early heretics wanting to avoid the scandal of saying that the man Jesus was God by saying that he only seemed to be a man. St Ignatius of Antioch amongst others refuted this heresy. He emphasised that the divine and human are both present in the one person, Christ through his use of terms like “the blood of my God,” and “the suffering of God,” which profess that whatever can be said of Jesus, is being said of God – thus affirming the true divinity of Christ. Although Ignatius did not attempt to set out what we can say about how divinity and humanity are combined in Christ, his response to this heresy anticipated and laid the groundwork for later development in the Church’s Christology – it is a beautiful example of how the Church’s faith that Christ was true God and true man was proclaimed and believed before all the theological bases on which it was later defended were fully worked out.
The controversy over the divinity of the Son came to a head in the fourth century, with the teaching of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that Christ was a creature. The resolution of that dispute took place at the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated the Nicean Creed, and its central definition that Jesus is “consubstantial with the Father.” We’ll look at that next time.
Alison Deighan