For many Christians, this Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Preachers tremble at the thought. Most of us find the discussions working with the Trinity to be either too erudite or so abstract as to induce eye-rolling. My daughter disliked the Nicene Creed for one reason: it is longer than the Apostles’ Creed that we usually read in church service. Her first commandment of liturgy is: shorter is to be preferred.If many of us have given it much thought, it may be due to The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown’s unreliable narrator’s dismissal of the council of Nicea ( and later Constantinople in 381 ) of 325. The Nicene Creed is a standard for many christian churches, so I thought I would give a little background to it. How do we speak of the relationship of the human Jesus to the divine? How do we make some order out of the bits and pieces of Scripture that address God in terms of Father, Son, Spirit?
Under Constantine, the young church had moved from the shadows to protected status within the Roman Empire. The church in the East was being roiled by disputes about the relation of Jesus to God. One popular approach was taken by Arius, who saw the Son as a God who emerged at some point after creation with the slogan, “there was a time when he was not.” Opponents feared that such a construct could lead to a second class God offering a second class salvation. Put differently, could God’s “only begotten” be another part of creation, or not?
John 1:14 says in the beginning was the Word, God’s (logos) logic, vision, perhaps idea or even plan.
Constantine called for a church gathering, a council, to seek to resolve the dispute, to establish good order and peace. Somewhere between 250 to 318 bishops attended the conference, and they met in a city meaning Victory,in present day Turkey now Iznik, where a mosque stands where they met. To secure the divinity of the Son, they used a phrase, of the same, one substance, one being, one essence (homoousious). Another way of saying this would be the same identity, perhaps.Arius apparently said that Christ was of similar substance (homoiousios). the historian gibbon thought it hilarious that the letter i, an iota in Greek, threatened to split the church.This is an attempt to make sure that the church was holding to the great confession of israel: the Lord our God is one. The phrasing is not in the Bible, but it was a way of trying to make sure that the Son, the one sent was not a demigod. Indeed, the phrasing was one preferred by the Emperor Constantine. The word itself seemed to be the cause of many church disputes, even provoking fights as tempers grew hot and flared.
Put another way, the Nicene Creed doesn;t define God, as much as it tells us what to avoid when speaking about God. It is a lighthouse beacon telling us where we should stay clear of dangers.
For Christians, God is made apparent in Jesus Christ. If you wish to know the nature of god, look to jesus Christ.God is for us, for the healing, the salvation of humanity.Nicaea is the touchstone as the church continues to always need to struggle with how to speak of the person of Jesus Christ and the relationship to God.Even an ecumenical council can err. Its work cannot be frozen in time, or encased in amber, as succeeding generations and cultures seek to affirm traditional teachings in ways that we can grasp, that we can translate. In the end, jesus told us to love God with all we have, including our minds. The attempts to speak of Trinity is our feeble attempt to do just that when speaking of the Christian god.
No comments:
Post a Comment