The key feature of
the creed is the Trinitarian structure.
So what does this mean for us and for the world in general?
The creed uses
Greek Philosophy to present and explain a Jewish God and that is the biggest
difficulty we have with the Creed. For
example we quickly come upon the tricky word homoousias which is usually
translated “of the same substance. This
places us in the realm of metaphysics which is not a good place to be because
meta means that it does not come from our experience rather it comes from our
imaginations, which are incapable of generating reality. Our minds are really good at in fact
generating idols.
For me Homoousias
indicates an identity of character between the one named Father and Jesus. This word is very important because it means
that The Father is exactly like the Son.
Of one being with the Father means that think and react the same. They are not good cop and bad cop. The Creed is helps us to constantly
rethinking the implications of what it means to have a Jesus-centered faith. If
we just “sign” it, if we just recite it we miss the point. We are meant to take
it all in, absorb it, meditate and reflect upon it, and begin to allow it to
reframe our theologies. If we sing it, if it becomes a worship document, if it
becomes a prayer then we will have rightly understood it.
This of one being
with the Father is crucial to our understanding of God. Jesus and his Father act and react with a
singular being. One of the earliest
Christian heresies was Marcionism.
Marcion could not reconcile the message of the gracious God he found in
the writings of Paul with the violent capricious God of the Old Testament
scriptures. Anytime anyone brings up
this question about the variance between the things that were attributed to God
in the Old and what Jesus did they are automatically looked at in the light of
Marcion. The Nicene Creed has no mention
of the phrase (“according to the Scriptures”) after affirming Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Notice that the Nicene
Creed says “who has spoken through the prophets” And As we know the prophets were among the
most severe critics of the Kings of Israel and their temple and
sacrifices. The creed does NOT say: “The
Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the Law and the prophets.”
Just because someone
sees a difference between the portraits of God in the two testaments doesn’t
mean they are a Marcionite. In the story
of the disciples on the road to Emmaus Jesus taught that all the law and the
prophets must be reinterpreted by himself.
Marcion who lived from 80- 150 AD, was a teacher who asked the question
what does the violent God of the Jewish Scriptures have to do with the
gracious, compassionate God revealed through the life of Jesus?
This is really
difficult because God does appear to change between the testaments. There have been a number of ways to solve
this problem but none until now have been satisfactory. Marcion’s solution was
to throw out the Jewish Scriptures and collect New Testament documents that had
been purged of this Jewish influence (Luke and some of Paul’s letters).
Influenced by the polytheism of his time and emerging Gnosticism, Marcion
taught that there were two gods, the Creator God of the Jews and the higher
God, who was Spirit, this latter God revealed in Jesus. By rejecting the
‘violent God’ of the Jewish Bible, Marcion also rejected the world made by the
Creator, the world of flesh, blood and sweat.
The church leaders
who opposed Marcion contended otherwise when they said it was one and the same
God; that the God who created was the God who redeemed. This was the orthodox
solution, which would soon run into a host of major problems and one in
particular: how to reconcile the character of God as found in the Jewish
Scriptures with the character of God found in the person of Jesus.
There were many
unfulfilling attempt at explaining the difference. One try was to say one was promise and the
other fulfillment. Or God could not
reveal himself all at once, because of our limited understanding. Or postulating different historical
dispensations, God acts certain ways at certain periods of time.
Finally it was
Augustine’s theory that predominated.
That is best known in his law-gospel dichotomy. These solutions while rejecting the two gods
theory of Marcion tended to be quite as dualistic as his was. Essentially God’s character has two sides
light and dark, loving and wrathful, merciful and punishing. This two-faced god has dominated Christian
theology ever since. The early church
fathers were dominated by categories of Greek philosophy. The problem with his is that God was already
a known quantity, what God could or could not do was already decided, apart
from God’s revelation to the Jewish people throughout history and ultimately in
Jesus life. When you start by thinking
you know everything you can’t learn or experience anything new.
These early
theologians were trying to put a square peg in a round hole by bringing
together the dynamic revelatory God of Judaism with the static unchangeable
thought patterns of Greek philosophy. One can see this over and over again. The
God of Exodus 3:14 (“I will be who I will be”) who will not be named, labeled
or boxed became the god who is unchangeable, without feeling, apart from space,
time and history. This is a god who cannot suffer and who is not affected by
the human situation. This god is remote and far removed from us this god is not
biblical.
Therefore the early
church fathers rejected the dualism of Marcion only to succumb to philosophical
dualism. This affected the way they interpreted their Scriptures, both the
Jewish canon and the emerging New Testament. They began to develop a doctrine
of God that was both parts oil and water, Jewish and Greek, biblical and pagan.
To put it quite bluntly, the definition of God that comes out of Greek
philosophy cannot contain the biblical revelation of the dynamic character of
the Trinitarian God known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” It is nearly unaffected by Jesus life and
death. Nor can we harmonize the character of Jesus with that of certain
traditions about “God” in the Jewish Scriptures.
I would say that a
reading of the Creed suggests that the writers are following a specific
trajectory “a prophetic reading of the Law”, a reading which critiqued the
sacrificial system and its attendant sacrificial violence. An example of this
can be found in Jeremiah 7, a text Jesus cites in the episode where he
symbolically shuts down the Temple. Jeremiah 7:21-23 “this is what the LORD
Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go ahead, add your burnt offerings to your
other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! 22 For when I brought your
forefathers out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not give them commands about
burnt offerings and sacrifices, 23 but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I
will be your God and you will be my people.”
Jeremiah is saying
that the sacrificial system was not part of the original Torah. Jeremiah was in contradiction to Torah. And, it is clear from the context that
Jeremiah is a trenchant critic of the sacrificial system and the Temple.
So is Jeremiah a
Marcionite? Is Jesus? Hardly!
To critique the portrait of God found in certain texts of the Jewish
Scriptures is not to engage in Marcionism but to follow the lead of the One God
who by the Spirit “has spoken through the prophets.” So are we ready yet to rethink the relation
between the Testaments and follow Jesus?
I believe we are
and next Wednesday we will explore the question of what it means to be Orthodox
or Creed following.