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Credo part II
this is the second half. the whole thing was so big, lj wouldn't let me post it.
One Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God
Jesus asks his disciples “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29). Christians believe that Jesus is Lord, the messiah of Israel from prophecy. He is the Word made flesh, God-with-us, come to join us, die for us, and remain present with us. He is the one we trust, the one we obey, then one who’s example we follow.
Being a Christian means to be a follower of Christ. You can believe in the same God and be Jewish or Muslim. You can believe the Great Spirit is the same as the Holy Spirit and follow Native American religious traditions. To be a Christian means you follow Jesus Christ. “Theological reflection is Christian to the extent that it recognizes the centrality of Jesus Christ and the salvation he brings (Migliore p 139).” Belief in Christ distinguishes Christianity from other religions.
The centrality of Christ in Christianity is more than just semantic. It is not only important that we believe in Christ. What we believe about him is also important. Christ is the human who kept covenant with God. His life and ministry are the example we must follow to live in correct relationship to God. Christ is the messiah foretold by the Hebrew Bible. Christians believe that Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection hold salvific meaning for all of humanity. Christ is the God’s fulfillment of covenant with His people, the expression of God’s love and mercy and the conduit for our knowledge of God. We trust him and obey his commands. We attempt to order our lives after his example in order to be righteous and in order to be close to God.
How do we know Christ?
Believing in Christ is not like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. Believing in Christ is heart-knowledge of the Word of God made flesh, sacrificed for us and still present with us in the Holy Spirit. It is faith that Christ has redeemed us through his suffering and hope that he will come again to complete God’s reconciliation with the world. Christ is not some story made up to get children excited or a marketing ploy. He is a real person who actually lived on Earth, came from a specific culture, had a short ministry, was crucified and raised from the dead.
There is historical evidence that there was a real man named Jesus who was crucified to show that Christ is not merely a Christian fantasy. Source criticism of the Bible essentially comes down to one question: Do we believe that Jesus’ followers essentially got him right, or did they misrepresent him? (Hill pp. 139-141). There are source criticism scholars who have gone searching for a historical Jesus . All of the first century sources of information about Jesus are Christian. Therefore the question of this type of study depends on presuppositions about the early church. If we suppose that the early church basically had the right idea about Christ, we wind up with a Jesus who looks very much like the one we know in the Bible. We see a man who was a Jew living in Jewish culture who was a charismatic religious leader and was crucified (Hill 9-9-03). If we suppose that the early Christians misunderstood and misrepresented him that we have very little information of any credibility. Most of the historical information presenting a view of Christ that conflicts with the Biblical view comes from the 2nd and 3rd century. Historical Jesus scholars who are looking to discredit the Biblical Jesus have a nasty tendency to retroject the views of the 2nd and 3rd century back into the first century without any evidence to support doing so (Hill 9-9-03). I remain unconvinced by arguments advocating misrepresentation. I believe that the Gospel is where we find the truest account of Christ.
We do not (barring divine revelation through mysticism) interact with Christ daily in the same way that his disciples did, but we do have access to Christ’s person through the gospel. There are three traditional paradigms for viewing Christ that stand out in the Gospel: prophet, priest and king. Each paradigm emphasizes different features of Christ.
Christ as a victorious king is one of the oldest ways of viewing Jesus. It came into wide use in the medieval church when rule by a king or lord was common. Most Christians had a conception of what a king was in a way that we don’t in modern day North America. The image of Christ as king (or Christus Victor) presents his followers with a strong, conquering leader who could defeat death itself. People died easily and comparatively young in medieval Europe, especially when plague and war were involved. A messiah who conquered death was an extremely meaningful concept for people who saw death all around them. This is the image we see in Biblical depictions of Jesus casting out demons and turning over the merchant’s tables at the temple. This is the Christ of the resurrection, the ascension and Revelations (Soulen 2-10-05).
Under the veil of his humanity, Christ battles with demons, the devil, and all the principalities and powers that hold human beings captive. By the cross and resurrection, Christ decisively defeats these powers and thus frees their captives (Migliore p152).
Despite differing circumstances from those of medieval Europe, a victorious Christ is still important to us today. We need a Christ who will conquer our hearts and dispel the sin lurking there. We need a Christ who will fight the violence and abuse still present in our lives, who stands up for the downtrodden, brings them hope and fills them with creative solutions.
Another important way to view Christ is as our priest. The Bible presents this image of Christ through his healing, his working miracles, his compassion and through his initiation of the sacraments. Humans live in a world that we have damaged with our sin. With our disobedience, we have marred the world God created and called good. In doing so, we have not only mucked things up for ourselves and separated ourselves from God, but we have given grave insult to our Creator. All of creation suffers with this insult. An obstacle gets placed in the way of God’s plan of consummation with creation. In order for divine will to triumph, God lowered himself to our finitude and became incarnate in Christ. What Christ brings into the world through his incarnation is beyond compare with other creatures. Christ is immeasurably precious. He is the essence of truth (Anselm, pp. 50-51). He obeys God and keeps the covenant between God and humanity. When Jesus gives his life for us, he gives something of infinite worth that repairs the insult done to God. He has given his life not as a punishment that he earned, but freely out of love for God and for humanity (Soulen 2-10-05). This view of Christ is the most personally meaningful to me even though alone, it does not present a full picture of Christ. The idea of such love being offered to me and to others is overwhelming and humbling.
The last of the three traditional ways to view Christ in scripture is as a prophet. The Bible shows us Jesus as a prophet in the images of his story telling, his compassion and his call to the people to change their ways. We are indifferent and flint-hearted to each other and to God. We need the love of God to melt our callousness away (Soulen 2-10-05). God’s love is unconditional and is the truest and greatest expression of God’s power whereby we have our existence and are sustained.
All of these ways of seeing Christ can be backed up scripturally. Like Calvin, I believe that to have a full understanding of Christ you must account for all of them (Migliore p 155). As useful as paradigms can be for helping us to understand someone or know how to respond appropriately to someone, no person can be encompassed by a paradigm and Christ was no exception to this. We gain our picture of who Christ is by allowing Christ to be who he is in Scripture, shifting between these paradigms and also outside of them.
Eternally begotten of the Father, Light from Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; through him all things were made.
Christ is not just another person, but possessed of divine nature. Christ is co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, just as that supreme spirit is eternal, so he eternally remembers and understands himself after the likeness of the rational mind – or rather, not after the likeness of anything; instead, he does so paradigmatically, and the rational mind does so after his likeness. Now if he understands himself eternally, he utters himself eternally. And if he utters himself eternally, his Word exists with him eternally. Therefore, whether he is thought to exist without any other essence existing, or along with other things that exist, his Word, coeternal with him, must exist with him (Anselm pp. 52-52)
There were early Christian arguments that it is not proper for God to subject Himself to a body and dirty Himself by interacting with humanity and death. But the God of Hebrew Scripture bent down to his creature, Adam and blew the breath of life into him (Gen 2:7). God created bodies and called them good. There is nothing intrinsically unclean about having a body; bodies are a gift from God. So the incarnation was no defilement of God, but a willing act of grace to give us access to Him. It was not the new creation of a new being, but the eternally begotten Word becoming flesh (John 1:1-14).
For us humans and for our salvation he came down from heaven
Jesus Christ is the one who saves. In his death, he takes the sins of creation and pays the price of God’s judgment on them. All creation gains a chance at eternal life in his death.
Jesus died the death of all living things. That is, he did not only die ‘the death of the sinner’ or merely his own ‘natural death’, He died in solidarity with the whole sighing creation, human and non-human – the creation that ‘sighs’ because it is subject to transience . . .This death is the sign of a tragedy in creation; but because of the resurrection of the Christ who died, the sign is re-interpreted into a universal hope for a new creation in glory (Moltmann pp. 169 -170)
Our salvation in Christ happens in five steps. First, Christ lives as the one human faithful to our covenant with God. He lives in correct relationship with God and does God’s will. He is the embodiment of shalom, God’s in-dwelling with creation. Second, Christ enters into solidarity with the lost and the least. God uses Christ as a light to find his lost and least as the woman with the lost coin uses a candle (Luke 15:8-9). The poor, the sick, the outcast, the contagious, the possessed, the sinners, the unlovable; Christ gathers all of these to himself and trades their misery for hope. It does not matter if they are at fault for being lost or if someone else is, or if no one in particular is at fault. He befriends them and values them when no one else will. Third, Christ suffers because he keeps covenant with God and cared for the lost and least. His faithfulness is costly. He suffers because he enters into solidarity with the lost and the least and shares their pain. Fourth, during Holy Week, Christ’s solidarity with the lost/least and his faithfulness to God intensify. Jesus isolates himself more and more. As the week passes, he stands more and more alone in his righteousness. As people fail to treat Christ or each other well, they get numbered among the lost and the least and Christ enters into solidarity with them. He suffers more and more. Finally he is in solidarity with everyone. He is condemned as unrighteous and a blasphemer even though he is the only righteous man left. Fifth, Christ’s crucifixion shows the depth of God’s solidarity with the least and lost. God suffers as his righteous child is broken and killed (Soulen 2-10-05). In the resurrection, all of us with whom Christ is in solidarity are brought into new life in Christ.
All three paradigms of priest, prophet and king are involved in the salvific acts of Christ. As a king, he conquers death through his resurrection. As a priest he performs a holy sacrifice of himself. As a prophet he foretells his own death and fulfils the covenant we are incapable of keeping.
Was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
and was made human.
Roman Catholicism venerates the Virgin Mary for reasons that I have never understood. Praise for her purity has often been translated into rejection of female sexuality and has caused centuries of problems for women struggling to understand and accept their sexuality. I believe that Mary was a virtuous woman who was chosen by God to bear his Son. In my opinion, Christ’s incarnation and presence among us is the real miracle. It does not especially matter whether Mary was a virgin when it happened or not. However I do not believe that she retained her virginity all her days. Jesus had brothers.
As Christians, we believe that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. Early Christians debated long and hard over this issue. They wanted a simple answer to explain questions of Christ’s divinity and/or humanity and how divinity and humanity could be combined in Christ. They had several councils to determine the answers to these questions and determined that Christ is two natures in one person. There are several reasons for this conclusion.
Christ must be fully divine. If true divinity never died on the cross in Christ, how can we know that his sacrifice bought our salvation? Christ’s divine nature allows him to do what we cannot do on our own – conquer our sin and live in right relationship with God. It allows him to keep our covenant. Christ’s divinity makes his death efficacious for our salvation. Some humans are known to have lived righteously before Christ (Gen 7:1) but their deaths did not bring our salvation. They were fully human but not fully divine and could not have bought our sin as Christ did. Because Christ is fully divine, we can trust his example to us of how we should live. Jesus knows the heart of God because he is the heart of God. Christ is the heart of God because he is the light in which we should see all other things, most especially God (Soulen 9-16-04).
Christ is also fully human. If he were not fully human, how could he truly come into solidarity with us? God knows our pain, but he knows it as our pain, not as His own. Pain does not change him or control him as it does humans. He is not divinity walking around in a human body. As Apollinaris pointed out, divinity in a human body is not really human at all (Gonzalez p 253). A Christ like this might still be unable to come into solidarity with us. Understanding human pain the way humans understand it requires true humanity. God took on that humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. It is also not the case that Christ is truly God only while he is not human or human only while he is not God. Christ is eternally of one substance with the Father, and eternally full in his humanity.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
Jesus’ death is both unique and representative. It is unique because it is his death, because it is quick (crucifixion was normally an extremely slow and torturous way to die), because alone of humanity he dies guiltless, and because it is an altruistic death for others (Soulen 2-10-05). Christ’s death is distinctively individual.
His death is also representative. Christ dies as Israel’s messiah, he dies as God’s Son, he dies as a Jew, he dies as a slave, he dies as the living one. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus’ death defied the expectations of Israel. Instead of redemption by conquering the Romans and liberating the Jewish people from political/military domination, Christ redeemed Israel with his death and resurrection (Moltmann pp 164-165). As God’s Son, Jesus is forsaken by God on the cross as his Father allows him to die. He is in solidarity with all who feel forsaken by God and all who have their requests denied (Moltmann pp 165-167). As a Jew, Jesus dies as a member of a persecuted and subjugated people. His “sufferings are not punitive sufferings which are a reflection of God’s judgment. They are sufferings which God himself suffers (Moltmann p 167).” As a slave, Jesus knew helplessness at his death. He was poor, humiliated, and without means to change his situation without denying his own identity. “The sufferings of Christ are also the sufferings of the powerless masses of the poor of this world, who have no rights and no home; and in this sense their sufferings too are Christ’s sufferings (Moltmann p169).” As the living creature, his death is in solidarity with the whole of creation that is redeemed in his death and resurrection (Moltmann p 169).
On the third day he rose again
In accordance with the Scriptures;
Jesus’ death is a tragedy insofar as he suffered and endured humiliation for our sakes, but it is a miraculous wonder in what it tells us about the love and faithfulness of God. This especially true in light of the resurrection. The resurrection keeps Jesus’ death from being an endless sorrow – because death didn’t stick! Three days after his execution, the tomb was empty and Christ raised from the dead. Through his solidarity with creation in death, Christ has redeemed creation and taken away the sting of God’s offended judgment on our sin.
But now that the Savior has raised His body, death is no longer terrible, but all those who believe in Christ tread it underfoot as nothing, and prefer to die rather than to deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the resurrection (St. Athanasius p 57).
In the resurrection, Christians learn of the triumph of Christ’s victory over death and sin. Even though we betray him and give up on him and don’t trust his word that he will return, Jesus forgives us and invites us to sit at his table just as he invited the disciples in John 21:12. He blesses us and sends us out into the world to serve God and our fellow humans.
he ascended into heaven
And is seated at the right hand of the Father.
Jesus did not and does not have to die again. Like Elijah, he ascended bodily into heaven to be with God where he continues to be in communion with the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit.
So what will the supreme goodness give as reward to one who loves and desires him, if not himself? For anything else he might give would not be a reward, since it would not recompense the love, or console the one who loves him, or satisfy the one who desires him (Anselm p 83).
As a person of the trinity, Christ is always with the Father and the Spirit as they are with him.
He shall come again in glory, to judge the living
and the dead,
Jesus has already glorified himself and the Father through his death and resurrection. When he comes to us again it will be with that glory. Christ will come again and judge both those who are alive and those who have died before. Christ in his role as judge is something with which I am currently wrestling. Christ is one with the Father and the Spirit, so his judgment will be the Father’s judgment and the Spirit’s judgment. Christ’s justice will be God’s justice and God’s justice is not something I claim to understand at all. I believe (and hope) that it is not like human judgment. Humans fail at justice because we lack infinite knowledge and divine wisdom. What we call justice is imperfect adherence to and enforcement of law that imperfectly provides for safety and fairness to its adherents. I do not believe God’s justice resembles human justice in these ways at all. If Christ decrees judgment, it will be as he decrees. Even so, given the choice, I would opt for a merciful God over a just God any day. I know better than to think I could be found guiltless. Scripture claims a God that is both just and merciful. As far as I am concerned, this is proof positive that God’s justice is not like ours.
At the same time, it is not the case that we can’t know anything about God’s judgment. The reason for this is that it is Christ who comes to judge us. I believe that this is absolutely the best news of all the Good News. It means that we know the one who comes to judge us (Migliore p 245). Christ is the one who tells us to forgive our enemies. Christ is the one who dies forgiving his own (everyone). Christ is not about revenge or excess punishment. Everything we know about Christ is his work toward reconciling love and covenant with God and his gathering of the lost and the least. God wills for all to come to Him. Christ is and will be merciful.
Yet we must account for a judgment with a sting. Not everyone will be saved (Mat 7:21). For the answer to this we must look at sin. If God is the source of life and all that is good, one way to describe sin is to say that it is turning away from God. We may have seven deadly sins, but they can all be boiled down to idolatry: the impulse to seek something else instead of God.
In turning away from God, we cut ourselves off from the source of life and goodness. Predictably, this makes us miserable. We give up our freedom to be in right relationship with God and enslave ourselves to the latest idea that we think will allow us to have our cake and eat it too. We start to see things differently and often do not even understand our slavery. When we sin, we are not free to act in right relationship with God. It is only through God’s grace that we are able shake loose of sin, repent and reorient our lives around God.
However, God does not force his grace on us. He offers it to all of humanity through Jesus Christ, He entices us with consummation; the purpose for which we were created. But God does not compel us to serve Him and be in relationship with Him. This leaves room for us to choose to turn away. In so doing, we condemn ourselves to self-created hell.
Hell is simply wanting to be oneself apart from others and even in disregard of others. Hell is that condition in which, in opposition to God’s agapic love and the call to a life of mutual service and friendship, individuals barricade themselves from others. Hell is the terrible weariness and incredible boredom of a life focused entirely on itself (Migliore p 246).
God allows us to isolate ourselves from each other and from Him. He allows us to spend our short lives in self-created hells. I believe that at Christ’s judgment we will also be permitted to reject God and each other.
and his kingdom will have no end.
Essentially this means that Christ wins. At the end of the day, we can trust that all will be as God wishes it to be after the eschaton, and that it will be that way eternally. Evil is not and never has been a serious threat to God’s sovereignty. It cannot create, but only twists and corrupts the good that is already in place. God created the world for the purpose of community and consummation. That has always been his plan for creation. His faithfulness to His plan and to us will make sure that He gets what He wants (Soulen 9-30-04). The righteous will be bodily resurrected and Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God’s consummation with creation.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
The person of the Holy Spirit is probably the most historically neglected in Christianity. As with the persons of the Father and the Son, we must ask who the Holy Spirit is and how do we know it. The Holy Spirit is the Sprit of God’s active love. It is nothing less than the Sprit of the triune God (Migliore p 169). It is the Spirit of community and transformation that causes us to turn toward God and toward each other. It inspires us and makes us sub-creators in God’s work, giving us the inspiration for a sermon or opening someone’s heart to the gospel when they are lost in the beauty of a hymn. The Holy Spirit is locked in eternal communion with the Father and the Son, exuded out of them like sunlight from the sun. “The Father and the Son equally neither make nor beget, but somehow (if one can put it this way) breathe out their love (Anselm p 70).” The Eastern tradition holds that claiming that the Spirit comes from the Son as well as the Father subordinates the Spirit to both. I understand the Spirit as both coming from and taking part in the Son and the Father. I do not believe it to be subordinate or on unequal footing with the other persons of the trinity. When people love each other, they do not talk about the love between them as being somehow lesser than the two people involved. They are grateful the love is there and work with the love to strengthen their relationship. We are not truly separate from how we feel or what we do. We are bound together with our actions and our emotions. It is much the same way with the Holy Spirit, except that the Holy Spirit extends further and is its own person.
We can see the presence of the Holy Spirit all through the Gospel. Christ bestows the Holy Spirit on his disciples (John 20:22), but it is present in his life from the very beginning. Through the Holy Spirit that Christ is conceived, and the Holy Spirit descends as a dove at Christ’s baptism into ministry. Through the Spirit Christ bestows healing on the sick, raises the dead and performs miracles to feed the people. The Spirit is God’s blessing to Christ, acknowledging him and gifting him.
We know the Holy Spirit from Scripture, but it is also the person of the trinity with whom we have the most direct contact. The Holy Spirit is in the world assisting us and turning us toward God. When we speak of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we usually mean the specific gift of speaking in tongues, however, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are much broader than that. Almost all Christian sermons begin with a prayer for the gifts of the Holy Spirit to use the sermon according to God’s will. The Spirit connects us to God and Christ and inspires our actions. It is critical for our relationship with God.
The Spirit communicates God’s being for us in Christ and kindles within us a responding gratefulness and love. This response, and the new relationship based on grace which it made possible, is faith (Runyon pp. 54).”
Through faith, the Spirit liberates us to freely choose right relationship with God. It also liberates us in other ways. The Holy Spirit frees those who are oppressed by injustice or abuse for action that allows them to find a way out of their situation (Migliore p 172).
An important way of looking at the gifts of the Holy Spirit is through vocation. All humans are given different talents and different passions that suit us for different duties. The Spirit also calls us toward the goal of community with God and others. God people through the Holy Spirit to work toward specific duties. “God freely elects creatures to be partners in the mending of creation. Election is not a call to privilege but to service (Migliore p 183).” A call is a joy because it brings to lives the meaning of knowing you are doing God’s work, but a call to God’s work is also inevitably a call to live in loving community with God and our fellows – the most difficult call to follow.
is worshipped and glorified
I don’t see the Holy Spirit worshiped and glorified very much, but it should be. The Holy Spirit is an equal person of the trinity. The Spirit is God’s active hand in the world today, sending personal experiences with grace that lead back to relationship with God. The Spirit is a necessary person of the trinity to whom we owe praise and worship. At the same time it is possible to put too much emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit. Gifts of the Spirit are not a sign of worthiness of a specific person (1 Cor. 12: 12-30)
who has spoken by the Prophets.
The Holy Spirit has been present from the beginning with the Word and the Father. It is through the Holy Spirit that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible found their inspiration. The prophesies that foretold the coming of Christ and demanded the repentance of Israel were foretold through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The healings of those prophets were gifts of the Holy Spirit. The work of God through the Holy Spirit is not confined to the New Testament and the story of Christ, or to the present where we feel and see its activity and gifts. Like the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit was in the past, is in the present and will be in the future.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
The Gospel calls Christians together as a community. Through our faith in one God and through the sacrament of the Eucharist, we the Church, are one people. We are one in the body of Christ sustained by faith in God through the Holy Spirit. We are a holy church because we follow the instructions God has given us for interacting with God and other people. We are the people called together to witness the message of the Gospel. When we talk about the Church as opposed to the church, we need to be prepared to address the common ideologies of Christianity rather than the smaller institutions that run their polities separately from one another due to theological or ecclesiastical disagreements. We are catholic because each of us embodies the entirety of the Gospel teachings. We are apostolic because we follow the teachings of Christ left by the Apostles (Soulen 3-31-05).
Historically Christians started as one church. Christianity was a persecuted faith and believers had extra incentive to stick together. There was a strong sense of identity associated with being a Christian that surpassed ethnic and national identity. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire the Church struggled and the Western half created the office of pope in order to preserve the authority and identity of the Church as separate from the will of the State. With the split of the Western Church during the Reformation, Protestant churches have been co-opted once again into identity as the religious arm of the state (Soulen 3-31-05).
The Church is a human institution filled with flawed humans. It is the witness and anticipatory realization of the coming reign of Christ. It is not identical with the reign of Christ (Migliore p 200). The Church is the body of Christ, but it is a fallible body because it fails to understand itself as a union and work accordingly. It often does not take good care of its parts and they get sick. Christ is the head of the body and suffers when the body is sick. There are many ways that the body of Christ becomes sick. I could go into discussion of these, but I think it is more useful to discuss how the Church can stay healthy.
In order to stay healthy, the Church must do a number of things. First and foremost it must allow Christ to be the head and not attempt to take direction out of the control of Christ. Distortions of thought can threaten Christ’s control over the Church because Christians come to Christ of their free will and not by coercion. The Church must stay in prayer and strong conversation with scripture to stay in relationship with Christ and follow his direction instead of the misguided ideas that often dominate national cultures.
Second, the Church must take a caring stance with its parts. When we persecute each other we destroy the integrity of the body of Christ. We harm ourselves when we harm each other and we fail to witness truly to the Gospel of Christ. We cannot show the world the love of God present in our community with one another if we do not keep that love in our community. Differences in theology or polity should never prevent us from treating one another with love and respect.
Finally, we must take a caring stance toward creation outside the Church. Christians are stewards of all creation and that means of people as well as the ecology. To be Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church, we must take seriously the command to “love our neighbors as ourselves” institutionally as well as individually. We must see the imago Dei in our friends and in our enemies and deal with them as beloved and indispensable children of God, not as disposable and unworthy. Christ never gave any commands saying “love your neighbor…. but only if he/she is worthy of it.” Christ said, “…just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40).”
As Christ entered into solidarity with the lost and the least, the Church must be comforter, teacher and advocate for the poor the oppressed, the hungry and the sinners.
We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
Baptism is the event in which Christians are incorporated into covenant with God. It is a sacrament that cleanses us and brings us into community with each other and with Christ. It is an efficacious sign of God’s grace, inviting us to repent of our transgressions and come into right relationship with God. It carries the command to be clean and reconciled with all of Christ’s brothers and sisters (Soulen 4-14-05).
There are two main camps when it comes to the issue of Baptism; those who practice infant baptism and those who believe that the choice to become a Christian can only be rightly made as a comprehending adult. There are problems with both of these practices. Infant baptism is performed with the consent of relatives, but not of the individual being baptized. The child is generally too young to voice an opinion, even if he/she did understand what was going on. There are also questions as to whether baptism can be effective without faith and if a child can have faith as an infant. Refusing infant baptism presents its own problems. One is that it places doubt on the power of God to make infant baptism efficacious. The other is that reserving baptism for those who can know what they are getting into excludes children from the community of believers and Christ.
I believe in the efficacy of infant baptism but feel strongly that parents understand what they are doing and that the parents expect to be a part of the community. If they cannot commit to being a part of the community, their child should not be baptized. The congregation also needs to have great respect for what they promise at any baptism, but most especially at infant baptisms. It seems that many congregations repeat the words of the baptismal vows without ever understanding the obligation they take on themselves when a child is baptized into their community.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Scripturally speaking, there is a lot more basis for a belief in a bodily resurrection than there is in a heaven that we all go to when we die. There is no mention of the word “heaven” in the Hebrew Bible. Sheol is mentioned, which is a place where people burn, but they burn up and die. They do not remain in torture for eternity. The concept of an immortal soul is a gentile concept that has been appropriated by Christianity (Hill 9-9-03). Christ speaks often of the resurrection, which was also a popular idea among the Pharisee sect of Judaism. What Christ promises is that those who follow him will be a part of the kingdom of God. But this is not the same as the heaven popularized by Warner Brothers cartoons. We are not promised chubby children in nightdresses with harps, halos and wings. We are promised resurrection. We are promised a “new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1).” It is more scriptural to look forward to the kingdom of God than it is to look forward to heaven.
Yet there are Biblical references alluding to another place to go at the end of life. Elijah in the Hebrew Bible and Christ in the New Testament are both reported to have ascended directly into heaven to be with God (2 Kings 2:11, Luke 24:51). Jesus also tells one of the thieves crucified with him “today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43).” We do not merely lie in the ground until the coming of the kingdom of God. There is a place where we can be and rest until the Day of Judgment.
Assuming that we are judged with mercy, this kingdom of God is where we should place our hopes. The kingdom of God is where we will find our consummation with God. It is when the reconciliation between God and his creation will be complete
Appendix A
Nicene Creed-Constantinopolitan Creed
From Confessing the One Faith, WCC
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
Light from Light,
true God of true God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us humans and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
In accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He shall come again in glory, to judge the living
and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
is worshipped and glorified
who has spoken by the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Appendix B - Examples of Bad Theology
I have two situations to report, both of which are currently going on at my home church – I have to say, I think this is generally a pretty theologically sound church, but I take issue with these two decisions.
1) Sex Ed.
A couple of years ago, my mother was part of a team that taught sex education at my church. It set out to actually teach youth the important facts about sex in a caring environment – and involve their parents. These classes dealt with sensitive subjects like premarital sex, birth control, disease and homosexuality. The kids really got to learn a lot of important facts. The teachers did not take a stance on these issues, but raised provocative questions between parents and parents and between parents and children. There is a conflict between more conservative and liberal parents at my church. Now the classes are being taught in a purely conservative stance that does not encourage real discussion. It is not a safe environment to ask provocative questions. What is worse, the adults are not really hashing this out either. It has been left to divide the church and the kids suffer for it. This is a big problem theologically because real theology is being discouraged. The tough problems are also the most interesting to most teenagers and are a good way to teach them to think theologically. Also pat answers and a rigid teaching voice discourage them from working through issues when they are going to have to make real decisions. I think such a conservative attitude ignores the real power of teenage hormones and encourages kids to sneak around parents they think they can’t trust. I also think the breach between the adults is a problem that needs to be addressed in order to restore the wholeness of Christ’s body.
2) Sex Scandal Insurance
My church has a youth mentoring program that I absolutely applaud. It was originally intended to match young people up with older Christians to talk about faith struggles and journey, provide an opportunity for asking questions in a safe environment, and provide transition for the youth as the enter into the responsibilities of their membership in the church. When the sex scandals in the Catholic Church gained media attention over the past couple of years (as if there weren’t sex scandals all the time in all the denominations), my church’s policy changed. Youth have to meet with adults with a chaperone present. This destroys the trusting relationship intended by the program in the first place. The conversations possible on a one to one basis are simply not possible with a third party present. I think the church failing to trust each other like one body of Christ and I also think it is allowing its mission to be distorted by outside cultural influences.
Works Consulted
St. Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion: With the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Trans. Thomas Williams. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.: Indianapolis, 1995.
St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press: Crestwood, 2003.
Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, 1963.
Cantwell Smith, Wilfred. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. Orbis: Maryknoll, 1987.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion vol. I. Ed. John T. McNeil. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, 1960.
D’Costa, Gavin. “The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions.” Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity vol I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1984.
Hall, Christopher A. and John Sanders. Does God Have a Future: A Debate on Divine Providence. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, 2003.
Hill, Craig C. In God’s Time. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, 2002.
Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce: A Dream. Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1946.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Way of Jesus Christ. Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1993.
Migliore, Daniel L. Faith Seeking Understanding. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids,1991.
The New Interpreter’s Study Bible. Walter J. Harrelson gen. ed. Nashville: Abington Press, 2003.
Runyon, Theodore. The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today. Abington Press: Nashville, 1998.
Sanders, E.P. Paul: A Very Short Introduction. New York. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Schwoebel, Christoph. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. Orbis: Maryknoll, 1990.
Soulen, R. Kendall. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1996.
Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology For A New Millennium. Doubleday: New York, 1989.
World Council of Churches. Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991.
World Council of Churches. The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A state on the way to a common statement. Faith and Order Paper No. 181.Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991
One Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God
Jesus asks his disciples “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29). Christians believe that Jesus is Lord, the messiah of Israel from prophecy. He is the Word made flesh, God-with-us, come to join us, die for us, and remain present with us. He is the one we trust, the one we obey, then one who’s example we follow.
Being a Christian means to be a follower of Christ. You can believe in the same God and be Jewish or Muslim. You can believe the Great Spirit is the same as the Holy Spirit and follow Native American religious traditions. To be a Christian means you follow Jesus Christ. “Theological reflection is Christian to the extent that it recognizes the centrality of Jesus Christ and the salvation he brings (Migliore p 139).” Belief in Christ distinguishes Christianity from other religions.
The centrality of Christ in Christianity is more than just semantic. It is not only important that we believe in Christ. What we believe about him is also important. Christ is the human who kept covenant with God. His life and ministry are the example we must follow to live in correct relationship to God. Christ is the messiah foretold by the Hebrew Bible. Christians believe that Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection hold salvific meaning for all of humanity. Christ is the God’s fulfillment of covenant with His people, the expression of God’s love and mercy and the conduit for our knowledge of God. We trust him and obey his commands. We attempt to order our lives after his example in order to be righteous and in order to be close to God.
How do we know Christ?
Believing in Christ is not like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. Believing in Christ is heart-knowledge of the Word of God made flesh, sacrificed for us and still present with us in the Holy Spirit. It is faith that Christ has redeemed us through his suffering and hope that he will come again to complete God’s reconciliation with the world. Christ is not some story made up to get children excited or a marketing ploy. He is a real person who actually lived on Earth, came from a specific culture, had a short ministry, was crucified and raised from the dead.
There is historical evidence that there was a real man named Jesus who was crucified to show that Christ is not merely a Christian fantasy. Source criticism of the Bible essentially comes down to one question: Do we believe that Jesus’ followers essentially got him right, or did they misrepresent him? (Hill pp. 139-141). There are source criticism scholars who have gone searching for a historical Jesus . All of the first century sources of information about Jesus are Christian. Therefore the question of this type of study depends on presuppositions about the early church. If we suppose that the early church basically had the right idea about Christ, we wind up with a Jesus who looks very much like the one we know in the Bible. We see a man who was a Jew living in Jewish culture who was a charismatic religious leader and was crucified (Hill 9-9-03). If we suppose that the early Christians misunderstood and misrepresented him that we have very little information of any credibility. Most of the historical information presenting a view of Christ that conflicts with the Biblical view comes from the 2nd and 3rd century. Historical Jesus scholars who are looking to discredit the Biblical Jesus have a nasty tendency to retroject the views of the 2nd and 3rd century back into the first century without any evidence to support doing so (Hill 9-9-03). I remain unconvinced by arguments advocating misrepresentation. I believe that the Gospel is where we find the truest account of Christ.
We do not (barring divine revelation through mysticism) interact with Christ daily in the same way that his disciples did, but we do have access to Christ’s person through the gospel. There are three traditional paradigms for viewing Christ that stand out in the Gospel: prophet, priest and king. Each paradigm emphasizes different features of Christ.
Christ as a victorious king is one of the oldest ways of viewing Jesus. It came into wide use in the medieval church when rule by a king or lord was common. Most Christians had a conception of what a king was in a way that we don’t in modern day North America. The image of Christ as king (or Christus Victor) presents his followers with a strong, conquering leader who could defeat death itself. People died easily and comparatively young in medieval Europe, especially when plague and war were involved. A messiah who conquered death was an extremely meaningful concept for people who saw death all around them. This is the image we see in Biblical depictions of Jesus casting out demons and turning over the merchant’s tables at the temple. This is the Christ of the resurrection, the ascension and Revelations (Soulen 2-10-05).
Under the veil of his humanity, Christ battles with demons, the devil, and all the principalities and powers that hold human beings captive. By the cross and resurrection, Christ decisively defeats these powers and thus frees their captives (Migliore p152).
Despite differing circumstances from those of medieval Europe, a victorious Christ is still important to us today. We need a Christ who will conquer our hearts and dispel the sin lurking there. We need a Christ who will fight the violence and abuse still present in our lives, who stands up for the downtrodden, brings them hope and fills them with creative solutions.
Another important way to view Christ is as our priest. The Bible presents this image of Christ through his healing, his working miracles, his compassion and through his initiation of the sacraments. Humans live in a world that we have damaged with our sin. With our disobedience, we have marred the world God created and called good. In doing so, we have not only mucked things up for ourselves and separated ourselves from God, but we have given grave insult to our Creator. All of creation suffers with this insult. An obstacle gets placed in the way of God’s plan of consummation with creation. In order for divine will to triumph, God lowered himself to our finitude and became incarnate in Christ. What Christ brings into the world through his incarnation is beyond compare with other creatures. Christ is immeasurably precious. He is the essence of truth (Anselm, pp. 50-51). He obeys God and keeps the covenant between God and humanity. When Jesus gives his life for us, he gives something of infinite worth that repairs the insult done to God. He has given his life not as a punishment that he earned, but freely out of love for God and for humanity (Soulen 2-10-05). This view of Christ is the most personally meaningful to me even though alone, it does not present a full picture of Christ. The idea of such love being offered to me and to others is overwhelming and humbling.
The last of the three traditional ways to view Christ in scripture is as a prophet. The Bible shows us Jesus as a prophet in the images of his story telling, his compassion and his call to the people to change their ways. We are indifferent and flint-hearted to each other and to God. We need the love of God to melt our callousness away (Soulen 2-10-05). God’s love is unconditional and is the truest and greatest expression of God’s power whereby we have our existence and are sustained.
All of these ways of seeing Christ can be backed up scripturally. Like Calvin, I believe that to have a full understanding of Christ you must account for all of them (Migliore p 155). As useful as paradigms can be for helping us to understand someone or know how to respond appropriately to someone, no person can be encompassed by a paradigm and Christ was no exception to this. We gain our picture of who Christ is by allowing Christ to be who he is in Scripture, shifting between these paradigms and also outside of them.
Eternally begotten of the Father, Light from Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; through him all things were made.
Christ is not just another person, but possessed of divine nature. Christ is co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, just as that supreme spirit is eternal, so he eternally remembers and understands himself after the likeness of the rational mind – or rather, not after the likeness of anything; instead, he does so paradigmatically, and the rational mind does so after his likeness. Now if he understands himself eternally, he utters himself eternally. And if he utters himself eternally, his Word exists with him eternally. Therefore, whether he is thought to exist without any other essence existing, or along with other things that exist, his Word, coeternal with him, must exist with him (Anselm pp. 52-52)
There were early Christian arguments that it is not proper for God to subject Himself to a body and dirty Himself by interacting with humanity and death. But the God of Hebrew Scripture bent down to his creature, Adam and blew the breath of life into him (Gen 2:7). God created bodies and called them good. There is nothing intrinsically unclean about having a body; bodies are a gift from God. So the incarnation was no defilement of God, but a willing act of grace to give us access to Him. It was not the new creation of a new being, but the eternally begotten Word becoming flesh (John 1:1-14).
For us humans and for our salvation he came down from heaven
Jesus Christ is the one who saves. In his death, he takes the sins of creation and pays the price of God’s judgment on them. All creation gains a chance at eternal life in his death.
Jesus died the death of all living things. That is, he did not only die ‘the death of the sinner’ or merely his own ‘natural death’, He died in solidarity with the whole sighing creation, human and non-human – the creation that ‘sighs’ because it is subject to transience . . .This death is the sign of a tragedy in creation; but because of the resurrection of the Christ who died, the sign is re-interpreted into a universal hope for a new creation in glory (Moltmann pp. 169 -170)
Our salvation in Christ happens in five steps. First, Christ lives as the one human faithful to our covenant with God. He lives in correct relationship with God and does God’s will. He is the embodiment of shalom, God’s in-dwelling with creation. Second, Christ enters into solidarity with the lost and the least. God uses Christ as a light to find his lost and least as the woman with the lost coin uses a candle (Luke 15:8-9). The poor, the sick, the outcast, the contagious, the possessed, the sinners, the unlovable; Christ gathers all of these to himself and trades their misery for hope. It does not matter if they are at fault for being lost or if someone else is, or if no one in particular is at fault. He befriends them and values them when no one else will. Third, Christ suffers because he keeps covenant with God and cared for the lost and least. His faithfulness is costly. He suffers because he enters into solidarity with the lost and the least and shares their pain. Fourth, during Holy Week, Christ’s solidarity with the lost/least and his faithfulness to God intensify. Jesus isolates himself more and more. As the week passes, he stands more and more alone in his righteousness. As people fail to treat Christ or each other well, they get numbered among the lost and the least and Christ enters into solidarity with them. He suffers more and more. Finally he is in solidarity with everyone. He is condemned as unrighteous and a blasphemer even though he is the only righteous man left. Fifth, Christ’s crucifixion shows the depth of God’s solidarity with the least and lost. God suffers as his righteous child is broken and killed (Soulen 2-10-05). In the resurrection, all of us with whom Christ is in solidarity are brought into new life in Christ.
All three paradigms of priest, prophet and king are involved in the salvific acts of Christ. As a king, he conquers death through his resurrection. As a priest he performs a holy sacrifice of himself. As a prophet he foretells his own death and fulfils the covenant we are incapable of keeping.
Was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
and was made human.
Roman Catholicism venerates the Virgin Mary for reasons that I have never understood. Praise for her purity has often been translated into rejection of female sexuality and has caused centuries of problems for women struggling to understand and accept their sexuality. I believe that Mary was a virtuous woman who was chosen by God to bear his Son. In my opinion, Christ’s incarnation and presence among us is the real miracle. It does not especially matter whether Mary was a virgin when it happened or not. However I do not believe that she retained her virginity all her days. Jesus had brothers.
As Christians, we believe that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. Early Christians debated long and hard over this issue. They wanted a simple answer to explain questions of Christ’s divinity and/or humanity and how divinity and humanity could be combined in Christ. They had several councils to determine the answers to these questions and determined that Christ is two natures in one person. There are several reasons for this conclusion.
Christ must be fully divine. If true divinity never died on the cross in Christ, how can we know that his sacrifice bought our salvation? Christ’s divine nature allows him to do what we cannot do on our own – conquer our sin and live in right relationship with God. It allows him to keep our covenant. Christ’s divinity makes his death efficacious for our salvation. Some humans are known to have lived righteously before Christ (Gen 7:1) but their deaths did not bring our salvation. They were fully human but not fully divine and could not have bought our sin as Christ did. Because Christ is fully divine, we can trust his example to us of how we should live. Jesus knows the heart of God because he is the heart of God. Christ is the heart of God because he is the light in which we should see all other things, most especially God (Soulen 9-16-04).
Christ is also fully human. If he were not fully human, how could he truly come into solidarity with us? God knows our pain, but he knows it as our pain, not as His own. Pain does not change him or control him as it does humans. He is not divinity walking around in a human body. As Apollinaris pointed out, divinity in a human body is not really human at all (Gonzalez p 253). A Christ like this might still be unable to come into solidarity with us. Understanding human pain the way humans understand it requires true humanity. God took on that humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. It is also not the case that Christ is truly God only while he is not human or human only while he is not God. Christ is eternally of one substance with the Father, and eternally full in his humanity.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
Jesus’ death is both unique and representative. It is unique because it is his death, because it is quick (crucifixion was normally an extremely slow and torturous way to die), because alone of humanity he dies guiltless, and because it is an altruistic death for others (Soulen 2-10-05). Christ’s death is distinctively individual.
His death is also representative. Christ dies as Israel’s messiah, he dies as God’s Son, he dies as a Jew, he dies as a slave, he dies as the living one. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus’ death defied the expectations of Israel. Instead of redemption by conquering the Romans and liberating the Jewish people from political/military domination, Christ redeemed Israel with his death and resurrection (Moltmann pp 164-165). As God’s Son, Jesus is forsaken by God on the cross as his Father allows him to die. He is in solidarity with all who feel forsaken by God and all who have their requests denied (Moltmann pp 165-167). As a Jew, Jesus dies as a member of a persecuted and subjugated people. His “sufferings are not punitive sufferings which are a reflection of God’s judgment. They are sufferings which God himself suffers (Moltmann p 167).” As a slave, Jesus knew helplessness at his death. He was poor, humiliated, and without means to change his situation without denying his own identity. “The sufferings of Christ are also the sufferings of the powerless masses of the poor of this world, who have no rights and no home; and in this sense their sufferings too are Christ’s sufferings (Moltmann p169).” As the living creature, his death is in solidarity with the whole of creation that is redeemed in his death and resurrection (Moltmann p 169).
On the third day he rose again
In accordance with the Scriptures;
Jesus’ death is a tragedy insofar as he suffered and endured humiliation for our sakes, but it is a miraculous wonder in what it tells us about the love and faithfulness of God. This especially true in light of the resurrection. The resurrection keeps Jesus’ death from being an endless sorrow – because death didn’t stick! Three days after his execution, the tomb was empty and Christ raised from the dead. Through his solidarity with creation in death, Christ has redeemed creation and taken away the sting of God’s offended judgment on our sin.
But now that the Savior has raised His body, death is no longer terrible, but all those who believe in Christ tread it underfoot as nothing, and prefer to die rather than to deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the resurrection (St. Athanasius p 57).
In the resurrection, Christians learn of the triumph of Christ’s victory over death and sin. Even though we betray him and give up on him and don’t trust his word that he will return, Jesus forgives us and invites us to sit at his table just as he invited the disciples in John 21:12. He blesses us and sends us out into the world to serve God and our fellow humans.
he ascended into heaven
And is seated at the right hand of the Father.
Jesus did not and does not have to die again. Like Elijah, he ascended bodily into heaven to be with God where he continues to be in communion with the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit.
So what will the supreme goodness give as reward to one who loves and desires him, if not himself? For anything else he might give would not be a reward, since it would not recompense the love, or console the one who loves him, or satisfy the one who desires him (Anselm p 83).
As a person of the trinity, Christ is always with the Father and the Spirit as they are with him.
He shall come again in glory, to judge the living
and the dead,
Jesus has already glorified himself and the Father through his death and resurrection. When he comes to us again it will be with that glory. Christ will come again and judge both those who are alive and those who have died before. Christ in his role as judge is something with which I am currently wrestling. Christ is one with the Father and the Spirit, so his judgment will be the Father’s judgment and the Spirit’s judgment. Christ’s justice will be God’s justice and God’s justice is not something I claim to understand at all. I believe (and hope) that it is not like human judgment. Humans fail at justice because we lack infinite knowledge and divine wisdom. What we call justice is imperfect adherence to and enforcement of law that imperfectly provides for safety and fairness to its adherents. I do not believe God’s justice resembles human justice in these ways at all. If Christ decrees judgment, it will be as he decrees. Even so, given the choice, I would opt for a merciful God over a just God any day. I know better than to think I could be found guiltless. Scripture claims a God that is both just and merciful. As far as I am concerned, this is proof positive that God’s justice is not like ours.
At the same time, it is not the case that we can’t know anything about God’s judgment. The reason for this is that it is Christ who comes to judge us. I believe that this is absolutely the best news of all the Good News. It means that we know the one who comes to judge us (Migliore p 245). Christ is the one who tells us to forgive our enemies. Christ is the one who dies forgiving his own (everyone). Christ is not about revenge or excess punishment. Everything we know about Christ is his work toward reconciling love and covenant with God and his gathering of the lost and the least. God wills for all to come to Him. Christ is and will be merciful.
Yet we must account for a judgment with a sting. Not everyone will be saved (Mat 7:21). For the answer to this we must look at sin. If God is the source of life and all that is good, one way to describe sin is to say that it is turning away from God. We may have seven deadly sins, but they can all be boiled down to idolatry: the impulse to seek something else instead of God.
In turning away from God, we cut ourselves off from the source of life and goodness. Predictably, this makes us miserable. We give up our freedom to be in right relationship with God and enslave ourselves to the latest idea that we think will allow us to have our cake and eat it too. We start to see things differently and often do not even understand our slavery. When we sin, we are not free to act in right relationship with God. It is only through God’s grace that we are able shake loose of sin, repent and reorient our lives around God.
However, God does not force his grace on us. He offers it to all of humanity through Jesus Christ, He entices us with consummation; the purpose for which we were created. But God does not compel us to serve Him and be in relationship with Him. This leaves room for us to choose to turn away. In so doing, we condemn ourselves to self-created hell.
Hell is simply wanting to be oneself apart from others and even in disregard of others. Hell is that condition in which, in opposition to God’s agapic love and the call to a life of mutual service and friendship, individuals barricade themselves from others. Hell is the terrible weariness and incredible boredom of a life focused entirely on itself (Migliore p 246).
God allows us to isolate ourselves from each other and from Him. He allows us to spend our short lives in self-created hells. I believe that at Christ’s judgment we will also be permitted to reject God and each other.
and his kingdom will have no end.
Essentially this means that Christ wins. At the end of the day, we can trust that all will be as God wishes it to be after the eschaton, and that it will be that way eternally. Evil is not and never has been a serious threat to God’s sovereignty. It cannot create, but only twists and corrupts the good that is already in place. God created the world for the purpose of community and consummation. That has always been his plan for creation. His faithfulness to His plan and to us will make sure that He gets what He wants (Soulen 9-30-04). The righteous will be bodily resurrected and Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God’s consummation with creation.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
The person of the Holy Spirit is probably the most historically neglected in Christianity. As with the persons of the Father and the Son, we must ask who the Holy Spirit is and how do we know it. The Holy Spirit is the Sprit of God’s active love. It is nothing less than the Sprit of the triune God (Migliore p 169). It is the Spirit of community and transformation that causes us to turn toward God and toward each other. It inspires us and makes us sub-creators in God’s work, giving us the inspiration for a sermon or opening someone’s heart to the gospel when they are lost in the beauty of a hymn. The Holy Spirit is locked in eternal communion with the Father and the Son, exuded out of them like sunlight from the sun. “The Father and the Son equally neither make nor beget, but somehow (if one can put it this way) breathe out their love (Anselm p 70).” The Eastern tradition holds that claiming that the Spirit comes from the Son as well as the Father subordinates the Spirit to both. I understand the Spirit as both coming from and taking part in the Son and the Father. I do not believe it to be subordinate or on unequal footing with the other persons of the trinity. When people love each other, they do not talk about the love between them as being somehow lesser than the two people involved. They are grateful the love is there and work with the love to strengthen their relationship. We are not truly separate from how we feel or what we do. We are bound together with our actions and our emotions. It is much the same way with the Holy Spirit, except that the Holy Spirit extends further and is its own person.
We can see the presence of the Holy Spirit all through the Gospel. Christ bestows the Holy Spirit on his disciples (John 20:22), but it is present in his life from the very beginning. Through the Holy Spirit that Christ is conceived, and the Holy Spirit descends as a dove at Christ’s baptism into ministry. Through the Spirit Christ bestows healing on the sick, raises the dead and performs miracles to feed the people. The Spirit is God’s blessing to Christ, acknowledging him and gifting him.
We know the Holy Spirit from Scripture, but it is also the person of the trinity with whom we have the most direct contact. The Holy Spirit is in the world assisting us and turning us toward God. When we speak of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we usually mean the specific gift of speaking in tongues, however, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are much broader than that. Almost all Christian sermons begin with a prayer for the gifts of the Holy Spirit to use the sermon according to God’s will. The Spirit connects us to God and Christ and inspires our actions. It is critical for our relationship with God.
The Spirit communicates God’s being for us in Christ and kindles within us a responding gratefulness and love. This response, and the new relationship based on grace which it made possible, is faith (Runyon pp. 54).”
Through faith, the Spirit liberates us to freely choose right relationship with God. It also liberates us in other ways. The Holy Spirit frees those who are oppressed by injustice or abuse for action that allows them to find a way out of their situation (Migliore p 172).
An important way of looking at the gifts of the Holy Spirit is through vocation. All humans are given different talents and different passions that suit us for different duties. The Spirit also calls us toward the goal of community with God and others. God people through the Holy Spirit to work toward specific duties. “God freely elects creatures to be partners in the mending of creation. Election is not a call to privilege but to service (Migliore p 183).” A call is a joy because it brings to lives the meaning of knowing you are doing God’s work, but a call to God’s work is also inevitably a call to live in loving community with God and our fellows – the most difficult call to follow.
is worshipped and glorified
I don’t see the Holy Spirit worshiped and glorified very much, but it should be. The Holy Spirit is an equal person of the trinity. The Spirit is God’s active hand in the world today, sending personal experiences with grace that lead back to relationship with God. The Spirit is a necessary person of the trinity to whom we owe praise and worship. At the same time it is possible to put too much emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit. Gifts of the Spirit are not a sign of worthiness of a specific person (1 Cor. 12: 12-30)
who has spoken by the Prophets.
The Holy Spirit has been present from the beginning with the Word and the Father. It is through the Holy Spirit that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible found their inspiration. The prophesies that foretold the coming of Christ and demanded the repentance of Israel were foretold through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The healings of those prophets were gifts of the Holy Spirit. The work of God through the Holy Spirit is not confined to the New Testament and the story of Christ, or to the present where we feel and see its activity and gifts. Like the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit was in the past, is in the present and will be in the future.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
The Gospel calls Christians together as a community. Through our faith in one God and through the sacrament of the Eucharist, we the Church, are one people. We are one in the body of Christ sustained by faith in God through the Holy Spirit. We are a holy church because we follow the instructions God has given us for interacting with God and other people. We are the people called together to witness the message of the Gospel. When we talk about the Church as opposed to the church, we need to be prepared to address the common ideologies of Christianity rather than the smaller institutions that run their polities separately from one another due to theological or ecclesiastical disagreements. We are catholic because each of us embodies the entirety of the Gospel teachings. We are apostolic because we follow the teachings of Christ left by the Apostles (Soulen 3-31-05).
Historically Christians started as one church. Christianity was a persecuted faith and believers had extra incentive to stick together. There was a strong sense of identity associated with being a Christian that surpassed ethnic and national identity. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire the Church struggled and the Western half created the office of pope in order to preserve the authority and identity of the Church as separate from the will of the State. With the split of the Western Church during the Reformation, Protestant churches have been co-opted once again into identity as the religious arm of the state (Soulen 3-31-05).
The Church is a human institution filled with flawed humans. It is the witness and anticipatory realization of the coming reign of Christ. It is not identical with the reign of Christ (Migliore p 200). The Church is the body of Christ, but it is a fallible body because it fails to understand itself as a union and work accordingly. It often does not take good care of its parts and they get sick. Christ is the head of the body and suffers when the body is sick. There are many ways that the body of Christ becomes sick. I could go into discussion of these, but I think it is more useful to discuss how the Church can stay healthy.
In order to stay healthy, the Church must do a number of things. First and foremost it must allow Christ to be the head and not attempt to take direction out of the control of Christ. Distortions of thought can threaten Christ’s control over the Church because Christians come to Christ of their free will and not by coercion. The Church must stay in prayer and strong conversation with scripture to stay in relationship with Christ and follow his direction instead of the misguided ideas that often dominate national cultures.
Second, the Church must take a caring stance with its parts. When we persecute each other we destroy the integrity of the body of Christ. We harm ourselves when we harm each other and we fail to witness truly to the Gospel of Christ. We cannot show the world the love of God present in our community with one another if we do not keep that love in our community. Differences in theology or polity should never prevent us from treating one another with love and respect.
Finally, we must take a caring stance toward creation outside the Church. Christians are stewards of all creation and that means of people as well as the ecology. To be Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church, we must take seriously the command to “love our neighbors as ourselves” institutionally as well as individually. We must see the imago Dei in our friends and in our enemies and deal with them as beloved and indispensable children of God, not as disposable and unworthy. Christ never gave any commands saying “love your neighbor…. but only if he/she is worthy of it.” Christ said, “…just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40).”
As Christ entered into solidarity with the lost and the least, the Church must be comforter, teacher and advocate for the poor the oppressed, the hungry and the sinners.
We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
Baptism is the event in which Christians are incorporated into covenant with God. It is a sacrament that cleanses us and brings us into community with each other and with Christ. It is an efficacious sign of God’s grace, inviting us to repent of our transgressions and come into right relationship with God. It carries the command to be clean and reconciled with all of Christ’s brothers and sisters (Soulen 4-14-05).
There are two main camps when it comes to the issue of Baptism; those who practice infant baptism and those who believe that the choice to become a Christian can only be rightly made as a comprehending adult. There are problems with both of these practices. Infant baptism is performed with the consent of relatives, but not of the individual being baptized. The child is generally too young to voice an opinion, even if he/she did understand what was going on. There are also questions as to whether baptism can be effective without faith and if a child can have faith as an infant. Refusing infant baptism presents its own problems. One is that it places doubt on the power of God to make infant baptism efficacious. The other is that reserving baptism for those who can know what they are getting into excludes children from the community of believers and Christ.
I believe in the efficacy of infant baptism but feel strongly that parents understand what they are doing and that the parents expect to be a part of the community. If they cannot commit to being a part of the community, their child should not be baptized. The congregation also needs to have great respect for what they promise at any baptism, but most especially at infant baptisms. It seems that many congregations repeat the words of the baptismal vows without ever understanding the obligation they take on themselves when a child is baptized into their community.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Scripturally speaking, there is a lot more basis for a belief in a bodily resurrection than there is in a heaven that we all go to when we die. There is no mention of the word “heaven” in the Hebrew Bible. Sheol is mentioned, which is a place where people burn, but they burn up and die. They do not remain in torture for eternity. The concept of an immortal soul is a gentile concept that has been appropriated by Christianity (Hill 9-9-03). Christ speaks often of the resurrection, which was also a popular idea among the Pharisee sect of Judaism. What Christ promises is that those who follow him will be a part of the kingdom of God. But this is not the same as the heaven popularized by Warner Brothers cartoons. We are not promised chubby children in nightdresses with harps, halos and wings. We are promised resurrection. We are promised a “new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1).” It is more scriptural to look forward to the kingdom of God than it is to look forward to heaven.
Yet there are Biblical references alluding to another place to go at the end of life. Elijah in the Hebrew Bible and Christ in the New Testament are both reported to have ascended directly into heaven to be with God (2 Kings 2:11, Luke 24:51). Jesus also tells one of the thieves crucified with him “today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43).” We do not merely lie in the ground until the coming of the kingdom of God. There is a place where we can be and rest until the Day of Judgment.
Assuming that we are judged with mercy, this kingdom of God is where we should place our hopes. The kingdom of God is where we will find our consummation with God. It is when the reconciliation between God and his creation will be complete
Appendix A
Nicene Creed-Constantinopolitan Creed
From Confessing the One Faith, WCC
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
Light from Light,
true God of true God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us humans and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
In accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He shall come again in glory, to judge the living
and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
is worshipped and glorified
who has spoken by the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Appendix B - Examples of Bad Theology
I have two situations to report, both of which are currently going on at my home church – I have to say, I think this is generally a pretty theologically sound church, but I take issue with these two decisions.
1) Sex Ed.
A couple of years ago, my mother was part of a team that taught sex education at my church. It set out to actually teach youth the important facts about sex in a caring environment – and involve their parents. These classes dealt with sensitive subjects like premarital sex, birth control, disease and homosexuality. The kids really got to learn a lot of important facts. The teachers did not take a stance on these issues, but raised provocative questions between parents and parents and between parents and children. There is a conflict between more conservative and liberal parents at my church. Now the classes are being taught in a purely conservative stance that does not encourage real discussion. It is not a safe environment to ask provocative questions. What is worse, the adults are not really hashing this out either. It has been left to divide the church and the kids suffer for it. This is a big problem theologically because real theology is being discouraged. The tough problems are also the most interesting to most teenagers and are a good way to teach them to think theologically. Also pat answers and a rigid teaching voice discourage them from working through issues when they are going to have to make real decisions. I think such a conservative attitude ignores the real power of teenage hormones and encourages kids to sneak around parents they think they can’t trust. I also think the breach between the adults is a problem that needs to be addressed in order to restore the wholeness of Christ’s body.
2) Sex Scandal Insurance
My church has a youth mentoring program that I absolutely applaud. It was originally intended to match young people up with older Christians to talk about faith struggles and journey, provide an opportunity for asking questions in a safe environment, and provide transition for the youth as the enter into the responsibilities of their membership in the church. When the sex scandals in the Catholic Church gained media attention over the past couple of years (as if there weren’t sex scandals all the time in all the denominations), my church’s policy changed. Youth have to meet with adults with a chaperone present. This destroys the trusting relationship intended by the program in the first place. The conversations possible on a one to one basis are simply not possible with a third party present. I think the church failing to trust each other like one body of Christ and I also think it is allowing its mission to be distorted by outside cultural influences.
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