Jesus Christ - The Defining Mystery or a Mystery Defined?

The Creed of Nicaea seems to be have been structured around three particular “articles”. This may not seem all that clear in our common English translation where it might be argued that there are four “articles” of what we “believe” in (God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, and Church). However, that does not hold up to what we find in the Greek. First, our English translation has inserted the word “believe” in three places where it does not appear in the Greek. It has also twice eliminated the word “And”, acting, in my opinion, as an extremely important connective conjunction. It is the “And…” which gives the Creed its triune character. What is claimed in the Creed is that: “We entrust ourselves in(to) One God…And One Lord, Jesus Christ…And the Holy Spirit” (the “And…” does not precede mention of the Church which, in essence, suggests that the Church is perhaps best understood as part of the article on the Holy Spirit. Interestingly enough, Oneness here is acknowledged not of the Spirit but of the Church. More on that when we get there). Thus, we are not acknowledging “belief” in three separate entities but trust in One God who is so mysteriously present and active that what may appear divided or separate is nonetheless united, is “One”. Today we will consider the second article of Nicaea which revolves around questions of who and/or what Jesus was and/or is.

The Council at Nicaea wrestled primarily with questions of who and/or what God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were perceived to have been understood. While subsequent generations, right down to our own time, have tended to focus on theological arguments over the being of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, I believe that it is arguable to claim that the focus of Nicaea (and subsequent councils) was more on the consequences of how such theological understandings impacted the Church’s unity. Afterall, there can be little doubt that the primary cause of division within the churches related to how these questions got answered. With that in mind, we might conclude that what got wrestled out at these councils was less theological and/or Christological than ecclesiastical (having to do with the Church and how it understood itself). In regards to the theological questions, I think we would benefit in recognizing the degree to which the Creed produced by these councils leans heavily away from over-defining their answers to these questions and embracing what we might conclude is a vague sense of the great mystery behind the God in whom we find ourselves trustfully united. It is worth noting that both the supposed champion of Nicaea, a bishop named Athanasius, and his supposed arch-rival, a priest named Arian, were each eventually accused of heresy for what can be understood as each of their own stubborn insistence that others embrace their rather over-clarified definitions or hit the highway. The cruelty of heresy, which comes in many different guises, is recognized in the attitudes of insisting on one’s own way. Whatever else was rubbing up against the sensibilities of those who gathered at these councils and threatening to cause division among them, there are two which warrant some attention as they are still playing out among us to this day.

First, there is the very clear intellectual superiority of the Eastern churches. The West, far more militaristic than the East, had a tendency to measure all things by the victor. At the end of a conflict, it was certain who the winner was and, by elimination, who the losers were. The churches in the East did not exactly understand everything in such stark terms. One example of this is how for instance Latin became the language of the Roman Empire and indeed the sacred language of the Roman-based Western Church. In the Eastern churches, even to our day in the Orthodox traditions, there was an understood unity without benefit of a common language. The Orthodox churches whether Greek or Russian or Armenian or Syrian or whatever are all identified by the language each uses.

Second, and probably the main reason why the East was intellectually superior to the West, is that they were much more comfortable contemplating and accepting the mystery of existing in the midst of questions rather than relying upon the force of argument (or anything else for that matter) to settle matters once and for all. We must remember that the East was the inheritor of the great Hellenic traditions of the Greek Empire. These included the philosophical schools of folk like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle who consistently entertained counter arguments for every attempt at conclusion. It also included, because of the geographical reach of that empire, exposure to the great religious and philosophical traditions of the Middle East and India including Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The West, on the other hand, tended to draw its inspiration and their interpretation of everything through the founding story of the the establishment and continuation of Rome as a militaristic powerhouse.

So with that in mind, back to the Creed.

“And we are in…” begins the second article of the Creed, implying an addition to the opening declaration of entrusting ourselves in(to) One God. “And we are in One Lord Jesus Christ…” Again, the emphasis is on unity. In this case, who and/or what Jesus is or does is best understood through the lens of unity. This is because there were some within the churches, perhaps even a majority, who insisted that Jesus could be best understood as having either a divided or a dualistic nature. While a good deal of this thinking revolved around how to resolve the dilemma of claiming that Jesus was both somehow human and likewise divine, the consequences of definitively answering that question had less philosophical reverberations than its divisive impact upon ecclesiastical unity. The Church, in some sense, was attempting to grow up by recognizing that it could live lovingly together in debate and disagreement but it could not live together unlovingly divided. If it could not live lovingly together, then it could not be, as Jesus called us to be in John’s Gospel, a witness to the world of the love which is the unifying bond we share in Christ with God.

Let us now briefly identify just a few of those differing understandings which various groups of people espoused, and indeed still do, in the churches and, in particular, the rather logical but inherently divisive conclusions drawn from such understandings. To claim that these are brief descriptions only underscores the risk of admitted gross oversimplification but, I do believe, will still get us closer to the gist of the issue and its resolution as outlined in the Creed.

There were some in the early Church (who history has called the Docetists) who were convinced of the absolute corruption of human flesh. Among them some would claim that this made it impossible for God to have taken on human flesh in Jesus or, for that matter, in anyone. The conclusion to such thinking was that only those who managed to flee, escape, or were somehow delivered from the irredeemable nature of human flesh could be identified and counted among those in the “true” church. Having convinced themselves that they knew how that happened, they alone possessed the insight to see who was in and who was out. It doesn’t take much to see how ripe with divisiveness such a world view is.

Others, making claims around similar lines, said that the gap between God and people was actually accomplished by Jesus. Adoptionists, as history identifies them, posited that Jesus had to win over God’s approval and acceptance. His baptism was for them the moment when God finally claimed Jesus as being worthy enough for adoption as God’s own newly created divine child. Jesus managed this, such thinking goes, by having proved himself as a morally outstanding person. The conclusion they drew is that all we have to do to get similar recognition and acceptance from God is to be as morally superior over the corruptions of human flesh as Jesus was (by the way this kind of thinking is still incredibly prevalent among a majority of Christians today). Once again though, thinking along these lines cannot but help to divide us into groups of whose got it and who doesn’t. Like it or not, it is potentially a very divisive understanding of the Church, exchanging our trust of what God has and is continuing to do and assuming for ourselves total control of the chosen few.

All these groups and individuals went from one extreme to another. While some claimed that Jesus couldn’t be human in any way at all, others would assert that he couldn’t have been in anyway divine. Others split the difference in the middle wrestling out that Jesus had two separate but equal natures. Still others, becoming somewhat lost and confused in the miasma of all these mental gymnastics, concluded that whatever was human about Jesus simply got swallowed up in the divine and, apparently, appropriately digested. However, the basic gist of all these schools of thought, and the issue the councils had and the continuing Church today should have with them, is how, in interpreting Jesus’ overcoming of this dilemma, they had decisively discovered how we all can likewise overcome the same dilemma and become “real” Christians, the “real” church. The “true” Christians of the “real” church, of course, stood in opposition to those who did not or would not play the game by their rules. The Creed, written to preserve the unity of all, preempts such thinking by claiming that, already gifted with unity by God in both the history of creation and the history of salvation, there is no dilemma. We might actually claim that the good news of Jesus Christ is the that there is no dilemma. Our unity with God, and subsequently with one another, is something already true and, being the result of loving acts of God, will remain forever true. We may well be entrusted with making known the grace of this unity, but it is not something we ourselves accomplish, nor can we by trusting something else frustrate it by what we do or not do.

All that follows about Jesus, in this longest of the three articles of the Creed, pushes us to trust that mysterious unity we already share in God, minimizing any and all notions that God wills division where there is and should always continue to be oneness.