Thoughts about our Faith‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it … The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not … But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.’ John’s Gospel,1, vv 1 – 5, 9 – 10, 12, 14.
Was/is Jesus the Son of God? Many people – and not only Muslims –doubt that. Some people believe that the usual language to describe the identity of Jesus as ‘God’ may not be appropriate in the 21st century. They say it is the language of primitive stories like those of the ancient Greek gods who married humans giving birth to heroes, Hercules and others. Some modern thinkers ask, Can we ever know what the first generation of Christians really thought about the identity of Jesus? To call him ‘divine’ might well have been the exaggeration of later generations. I say that there is ample evidence in the New Testament to show that the first generation was quite convinced that Jesus was the unique Son of God. Michael Green writes with reference to Paul’s letter to the Christians at Colossae: ‘Paul is countering a heresy in which Jesus is put alongside other mediators as just one of the ways to God … Paul denies this strongly (Col 1, vv 15 ff). He lumps together the so-called mediators between God and man which these Colossians espoused and asserts that the “image of God we cannot see” is found in “his beloved Son” alone He makes the point again with immense force in 2, vs 9: “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”’
Another question modern thinkers ask is this: Are the 4th century Creeds which describe Jesus as ‘eternally begotten of the Father … one in Being with the Father … born of the Virgin Mary and became Man’ more a product of Greek theorizing than of God’s revelation? But that God should become man in an historical event was as outrageous to the sophisticated Greek thinkers in the 1st century as it was to Jews. Those Greeks took the primitive stories of Hercules and others no more seriously that we do. These thinkers were concerned to communicate the revelation to others in a way which could be understood and which made it clear that Jesus was not another Hercules. There were others who did try to adjust this understanding to make it fit the rest of their life experience – people who failed to realize that Jesus is unique. That is why in the 4th century all the bishops met several times to seek God’s guidance for a definition of belief which would at least exclude wrong understandings: the result was the Creed which was agreed at Nicea which is the Creed which we use at Holy Communion. But there is nothing in that Creed which is not contained in the Bible, God’s revelation to us.
A third question which modern thinkers ask is, Can the Creeds be explained without paradox or mystery, without an apparent lack of logic? But there are bound to be limits to our understanding of God becoming Man. This need not mean that we must reduce it to something we can understand totally not only with our wills and emotions but also with our minds. May we all know even more the grace and truth of God become human: Christian Baptism ‘The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off - all whom the Lord our God will call.’ Acts 2, verse 39. |