If God is One with Jesus and Jesus is One with Us then…

As we proceed deeper into our consideration of the second article of the Nicene Creed, which revolves around who Jesus is, it is important to remember that there were not only a lot of various opinions about this - as there still are - but, more importantly, each of these understandings cannot but help to impact understandings of how the perception of Jesus determines what unifies people or divides people from one another irrespective of whether those people claim to be Christian or not. If the great motivating factor behind the composition of the Creed is, as I believe it was and is, the God-given unity of all, and particularly the Church, than the authors of the Creed were not interested in setting up parameters around the Church, dogmatic or otherwise, to make sure we could be rid of those who differed from us. Rather, the Creed’s design was to actually prevent us from ever having the need to create and/or adopt such parameters, dogmatic or otherwise. This may be initially difficult to grasp because we are the products of understandings and teachings which, for centuries, have presented the Creed as little more than an instrument to gauge our fidelity to certain dogmatic parameters. Working backwards through so much misleading indoctrination, I believe, is absolutely essential if we are to understand the Creed for what it was and what it was intended to continue to be.

So what is the Creed trying to get us to understand about the Oneness, the unity, of God and Jesus?

“And in(to) One Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God…”

First, the second article begins in the same manner as the first article. While not repeating the active verb of entrusting ourselves in this, it is, in the complete absence of an active verb, implied that we are similarly entrusting ourselves to a unity which we not only enjoy in Jesus but is, indeed, equivalent to the unity we enjoy and are gifted with in God. Christ, it should perhaps not go unmentioned, is not Jesus’ last name. It is rather a biblical title of sorts which, perhaps, is best translated as “The Anointed”, but has also been understood as “Messiah.” Biblically speaking, this title is not reserved to any particular individual. In fact, in one amazing incident in the Book of Isaiah, it is conferred upon a pagan king for being understood as the instrument (the Messiah) through whom the children of Israel are to receive their deliverance from more than seventy years of exile from the land of Israel. Most of the kings of Israel had been understood as God’s “Anointed”. The title, on its own, does not attribute any unique claim to who Jesus was or is. Nor, interestingly enough, does the following phrase, “the son of God.” Again, biblically speaking, many people are clearly and unashamedly spoken of as the children of God and/or the sons and/or daughters of God. The phrase “God’s only son” never, as such, actually appears in scripture. Our common understandings often put it where it is not (the most familiar being John 3:16). Rather, it is only in the writings associated with John that we find the phrase we find in the creed of Nicaea - but more on that in a bit. As for Jesus’ own self-understanding, he seemed partial to speaking of himself as simply the “son of ‘adam” - the son of Man, or, more adequately, a child of humanity. As all this descriptive nomenclature is used in reference to common humanity, perhaps it is best if we continue to see it as expressive of Jesus’ own affiliation with our common humanity. It is the next phrase through which we begin to wade deeper into the mystery of Jesus’ rather unique affiliation with the Divine.

“Jesus…the Only Generated…” Here we are instantly hurled into the language of the courtroom. This is the parlance of legalese. It deserves to be understood for the legal claim that it is rather than whatever else we may want to read into it. The Greek phrase reads: “monogenai” - as in monogenetic or mono-generated. Borrowed directly from court proceedings, in cases addressing the rights of inheritance, this phrase implies that there are no other claimants to what is to be inherited. In both the scriptures and in the creed, it implies that Jesus alone is the one who has the sole right to all of God’s property and possessions. Of course, as already claimed in the first article of the creed, as God has created all, there is nothing which is not God’s, therefore Jesus has the sole claim to all that is. Nothing and no one is left out. What follows, resembling more the twisting of a cinematic plot whereby the mystery is resolved with the supposed claimant to the estate ripping off a mask to reveal they were the original lord of the estate all along, begins to scratch more incessantly at the mystery of who this Jesus we entrust ourselves in is.

The phrase, commonly read as “eternally begotten of the Father”, is given an expansively strengthened understanding if we hear it recited, closer to the original Greek, as “generated out of the Father for the entirety of the ages”. This is an interesting phrase which, I’ve already suggested, carries for us an expansive sense of meaning. “For” here can mean “on behalf of”, but it can also, and simultaneously, mean “toward” for the purpose of being near. Even “entirety” as used here carries multiple possible meanings of both time and things, akin to “everything for all time”. “The ages” is inclusive of all times and not just some age at the close of time. Thus, we might hear this as claiming that Jesus is perpetually generated out of the Father (of all that is) throughout all ages of time. This is a deeply profound and mysterious claim implying that, not only is Jesus and God one and the same, but all that has been, is, and is yet to be is already and for ever one with God.

On the heels of this claim follow words intended to ground into our understanding the extent to which Jesus’ identity is one and the same with how we might identify God the Creator of all: “Light out of light, the life-affirming God out of the life-affirming God, generated not created (or made), one-substance to Abba, through whom all things came to be generated”.

A few comments about the above freely transliterated reading of the words of the creed. “True God from true God” is freely translated as “life-affirming” because the Greek word often translated as “truth” is “aletheia.” The prefix “a” negates the operative root of the word “lethe.” “Lethe” actually means forgetfulness - as in the mythic River Lethe whose waters prompt among the dead a forgetfulness of any previous life. It also, to some degree, gives us the English word “lethal”. Thus, to negate forgetting, aletheia makes life worth remembering. It is to affirm the life that was and, held in remembrance, continues to be. The embodiment of God in Jesus offers affirmation for our lives, for all life. “Truth”, as we commonly understand such a concept, is woefully inadequate to get at what is being claimed here.

In like manner, “of one being with the Father” - which does strain toward what is being claimed here, doesn’t quite get there. Rather, in the Greek it reads “one-substance to Dada”. One-substance is, in the Greek, “homo-ousion”. Now I know this will be a rather cheap and linguistically wrong translation of the word “homo-ousion”, but it gets a lot closer to the meaning of the phrase than pages of explanation ever will. The prefix “homo”, rightly translated, means “same”. The root, transliterated (though not translated) gives us the English word ooze. Jesus and Dada (again, without a definite article, this is more akin to the intimate phraseology of an infant’s cry for their dada or mama) are of the same ooze, so indecipherable from one another in the ooze that they are, they are essentially the same through whom all things came to be.

It is important to understand that none of the above designations are a claim to “knowledge” of who either God or Jesus is. Rather, these are all metaphorical designations attempting to shine a very dim light into the rather dark mystery of God which, remaining a mystery, cannot be understood through knowledge but merely experienced through trust. Another Creed, composed in Latin, about a hundred years after the more-or-less final composition of the Nicene Creed (evidence that disputation and division continued in the churches), adequately expresses this mystery. Dubiously attributed to Athanasius, the supposedly revered champion of Nicaea, it claims that the Trinity, among other things, is “not three incomprehensibles…but…one incomprehensible”.

Claims to “knowledge” within the churches have had a long and disruptively fitful history. Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth is essentially written because of the way the community’s ability to commune in love was being threaten by some who claimed to “know” what others in the community did not and should “know”. The Greek word for knowledge is “gnosis” from which we get such English words as prognosis (a knowledge of what might be), diagnosis (a knowledge of reading through something), agnostic (one who doesn’t care to know), etc. It is a word which the Church has used to identify a wide variety of different groups under a heresy called “Gnosticism”. Gnostic-leaning religions or philosophies basically claim possession of some special knowledge which can alone lead to salvation for those who know it. Gnostic faiths existed long before Christianity and continue today in various guises both extreme and subtle. Throughout history most Gnostic-oriented people couldn’t care less about Christianity or the Church. However, when such philosophies do rise up among Christian believers - and they seem to perpetually arise among us, they always generate a divisive spirit within the churches. The simple assertion or inference that somebody knows something that somebody else doesn’t, can hardly help but imply that those in-the-know are among the in-crowd of God’s favored people and all others…well, I think we can all see where this leads.

The Nicene Creed is neither claiming nor promoting any salvific “knowledge” to which we must adhere if we are to be “saved”. Rather, it is calling us to a great mystery which is making a very bold proclamation of some good news of a great joy claiming that, because God is who God is and Jesus is who he is in that God, we are already, with all creation, loved to the point of already being “saved”, of being brought to our completion, our wholeness, with God and one another and all creation, in that love, ever present and ever active throughout all ages and for all time.