The first Article of the Creed, as we have seen, is an affirmation of faith in God the Father, the Creator of all things. The second Article is an affirmation of faith in God the Son. It is the first of six Articles that pertain to the Son before the affirmation of faith in God the Holy Spirit in the eight Article. Since the Creed consists of twelve Articles in total, this means that half of them concern God the Son.
In the
Apostles’ Creed the second Article is “et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius
unicum, Dominus nostrum” which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “And in Jesus Christ his only Son our
Lord”. In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed the second Article is “Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, τὸν Υἱὸν
τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων.” In this series we shall treat what is
ordinarily considered the third Article of the conciliar Creed to be part of
the second. This is “φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν
ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί· δι' οὗ
τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο.” Taken together, these are rendered in the Book of Common Prayer as “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the
only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God
of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not
made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were
made.” Note that in the Greek of the
Creed the words “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” do not precede “φῶς ἐκ φωτός”. Here the Book
of Common Prayer follows the Latin which has “Deum de Deo” before “lumen de
lumine”. This is one of two places
where the Latin text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed inserts something
that is not present in the original Greek, the other being the famously
controversial Filoque in the Article about the Holy Spirit. This is less controversial than the Filoque
which played a key role in the dispute which led to the Greek and Latin
Churches breaking Communion with each other because here the Latin
interpolation does not express anything about which the Latin and Greek
Churches are in theological disagreement.
Indeed, “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” appeared in the original Nicene Creed of 325 AD
but was dropped when the Creed was revised at the First Council of
Constantinople of 381 AD. Redundancy
seems to have been the reason for its having been removed. In the original Nicene Creed the words “μονογενῆ,
τοὐτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός, Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” followed “begotten of the
Father” and preceded “Light of Light”. The
First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) in revising the Creed moved the μονογενῆ
and placed it in attributive position to “the Son of God”. The remainder of these words which assert
nothing that was not stated more precisely later in the same Article (1) were
replaced with “before all worlds”. Nobody
really knows how “Deum de Deo” made its way back into the Latin version of the
Creed. It is also present in the Armenian
version of the Creed but so are all the other words that were removed from the
original Nicene Creed in the Constantinopolitan revision and this version also expands
the “through whom all things were made” so as to repeat the “heaven and earth”
and “visible and invisible” clauses of the first Article.
The first Article of the Creed, as we saw in our discussion
of the same, established continuity between the faith we confess as Christians
and the faith of Old Testament Israel by asserting our belief that the One God,
the Father, is Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and
invisible. In this second Article, the
faith we confess diverges from that of others who claim continuity with the Old
Testament religion. We believe in Jesus
Christ.
Who is Jesus Christ?
Jesus is the Name of this Second Person Whom we confess
alongside God the Father. St. Luke in his Gospel tells of the
Annunciation, the visit the angel Gabriel paid to the Virgin Mary to tell her
that she was favoured by God in that she would bear a child Who would be God’s
Son. Gabriel told her that her Son was
to be given the name Jesus. St.
Matthew in his Gospel records that at some point after this Joseph of Nazareth
to whom Mary was espoused was visited by an angel in a dream who told him to
marry Mary and raise her child Who was the Son of God. Joseph is also told to give the child the
name Jesus and is given a reason for the name “for he shall save his people
from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). This is what the name Jesus means. It was a common name among the Jews because
it was the name of an important figure in the Old Testament. יְהוֹשֻׁעַ
which when put directly into English from Hebrew is traditionally rendered
Joshua was the name of one of Moses’ lieutenants, who led the Israelites into
battle against various enemies when they were en route from Egypt to the
Promised Land, who was one of the spies Moses sent into the Promised Land and
the only one other than Caleb who proved to be faithful, and who was chosen to
lead the people into the Promised Land after Moses death. The book narrating the conquest of Canaan
bears his name. The book of Numbers
tells us that his name was originally Oshea but that Moses changed it to
Jehoshua or Joshua. Oshea means
“salvation”. J(eh)oshua means “Jehovah
is salvation”. Jesus is this Name after it has been
transliterated from Hebrew into Aramaic, then from Aramaic into Greek, then
from Greek into Latin, and finally Anglicized by the removal of inflection and
rendering Latin’s consonantal I as J. It
is in the divine Person Who bears this name in the New Testament that its
meaning is truly fulfilled. The Old
Testament Joshua prefigured Him. Through
Joshua, God brought His people out of the wilderness in which they had been
wandering due to their disobedience and into the Promised Land. Indeed, in the fact that Moses, through whom
the Law was given and whose name often signifies that Law, led the people in
the wilderness but could not lead them across the Jordan into the Promised
Land, which was reserved for Joshua, we see illustrated in the Old Testament
that key theme of the New, that the Law cannot take a person from the wildness
of sin and bring him into the Promised Land of peace with God, only Jesus can
do that. Jesus is Jehovah come into the
world to save His people and the world from sin by taking that sin away on the
Cross.
Christ is said or written together with Jesus so often that
many assume it to be His surname. It is
more accurately thought of as a title.
As with the name Jesus it is the Anglicization of the Latin spelling of
a Greek word that represents a Hebrew original. In this case, however, the Greek word is a
translation rather than a transliteration of the Hebrew. The Hebrew word is מָשִׁיחַ which is
rendered directly into English as Messiah.
This word means “Anointed One”.
In the Old Testament the kings of Israel were anointed with oil. So were the high priests and, on at least
one occasion, prophets. Samuel was
instructed by God to anoint first Saul, then David, as king with oil. David would not harm Saul because he was
“the LORD’s anointed”. While every king
of Israel and every high priest was a
small-m “messiah” or small-c “christ”, the
big-M Messiah or big-C Christ was the promised King who would arise out of the
House of David to restore and redeem Israel.
Promises of this Redeemer-King can be found throughout the Old Testament
but especially in the writings of the prophets who arose to warn Israel and
Judah and call them to repentance in the period just before and during the
Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that took the northern and southern kingdoms
captive respectively. In the prophetic
writings it is promised that the future King will not merely restore Israel to
what she was under David and Solomon but will usher in a Golden Age in which
all nations will acknowledge His kingdom which will last forever, a New
Covenant will be written in the hearts of man rather than on tablets of stone,
and the curse on Creation due to man’s sin will finally be lifted.
The Gospel Jesus preached to Israel from the beginning of
His earthly ministry was “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”. “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” can be
paraphrased as “the promises are fulfilled, the Kingdom is present among you
now”. Jesus could proclaim such a
Gospel because the Kingdom was present in the Person of Himself, the King. He explained to them, however, in His
teachings, that His Kingdom was spiritual rather than political and that it was
bondage to sin that He came to deliver them and the world from rather than from
the Roman Empire. That He, Jesus, is “the
Christ, the Son of the Living God” was the sole article in the very first
Christian confession or creed. This was
the confession made by St. Peter in response to a query from the Lord first
about Whom His disciples said that He was.
Jesus praised the confession as revelation from His Father in Heaven and
declared that He would build His Church upon this rock, then began to explain
to His disciples that He would be crucified and rise again the third day. Later, just before He raised her brother
Lazarus, Martha made the same confession as St. Peter in response to Jesus’
asking her whether she believed His assertion that “I am the resurrection, and
the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live And
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-27). These interactions show that the Christ, the
promised King of the House of David, the High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek,
the Prophet greater than Moses, was the One Who gives everlasting life to all
who believe in Him and that to do so He had to die Himself then rise again.
In the confession of St. Peter and Martha, “the Christ” and
“the Son of God” are placed in apposition which is a way of saying that the two
expressions refer to the same Person without needing an extra word to link or
equate them. In the Psalms of David
there are a number of verses in which the LORD speaks to or about the Messiah
as His Son. The Old and New Testaments
use the expression “son of God” with several different meaning. In the book of Job, the “sons of God” who
assemble in His court are usually understood to be the angels. In St. Paul’s sermon at Mars Hill he spoke of
all people as being God’s children. In
the Old Testament the nation Israel is sometimes spoken of as God’s son and in
the Johannine literature of the New Testament believers in Jesus are said to be
children of God. When either Testament
speaks of Jesus, the Christ, as the Son of God, however, He is not spoken of as
being One Son among many, but as God’s Only Son. Similarly, when Jesus speaks of God the
Father, He sometimes speaks of Him as His Father and He sometimes speaks of Him
to His disciples as “your Father”, but He never speaks of God as “Our Father”
so as to make His Sonship identical with that of His disciples. While the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our
Father” this is not Jesus including Himself with His disciples in “Our” and
joining them in a common prayer but prescribing this form of prayer to
them. The way in which Jesus is God’s
Son, therefore, is unique to Himself and not shared with any other.
Everything in the portion of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed that we are considering alongside the second Article of the Apostles’
Creed that is not also found in the second Article is there for the purpose of
clarifying precisely what it means that Jesus is the Son of God. This was at the heart of the controversy
over which the two first Ecumenical Councils, the ones which gave us the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, were convened. A priest in Alexandria named Arius taught
that Jesus was the first creation of God, Who had a beginning before which He
was not, that God had created Him out of nothing with a similar but not
identical nature to His Own, and then through Him had created all other things.
When his heresy began to spill out and
infect other dioceses and provinces outside of Alexandria, the First Council of
Nicaea was convened to deal with the controversy. The orthodox side, led nominally by Arius’
own bishop, the Patriarch Alexander I of Alexandria, but in actuality by his
archdeacon Athanasius, prevailed, the Arian positions were anathematized, and
the Council published the original Nicene Creed, but the controversy continued
long after with the Arians at times having the upper hand (Athanasius, who succeeded
Alexander as Patriarch of Alexandra, was temporarily deposed of his See for
seven years and was sent into exile on five separate occasions), making
necessary the First Council of Constantinople which revised the Creed into the
form we know today and condemned Arianism as heresy.
Before the second Ecumenical Council produced the final
version of the Creed there were numerous attempts by Arian groups and other
similar heresies to revise the Nicene Creed to their liking. An account of these can be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates
Scholasticus, the fifth century Christian historian who picked up where
Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” left off. (2) The word in the Nicene Creed to which the most
objections were made was ὁμοούσιον which means “of the same essence”. The heretical revisions replaced this word
with such alternatives as ὁμοιούσιον which means “of a similar essence” and ὅμοιον
which means “similar” in a more general sense.
There are many today who consider such disputes to be hairsplitting but
the orthodox side was right to stand its ground and insist upon ὁμοούσιον
because that one iota that separates ὁμοούσιον from ὁμοιούσιον is the
difference between the Son being God and the Son being a creature, the closest
to God of all creatures, but a creature nonetheless. The word ὁμοούσιον captures what it is that
makes Jesus’ Sonship distinct from that of all lesser beings who are in some
lesser sense children of God. Human
beings in general and angels are “sons of God” in the sense that they are His
creatures but this does not make them God.
Christians are children of God through regeneration (John 1:12-13) and
adoption (Rom. 8:15) but this does not make them God. In creation, living things reproduce after their
own kind. A cat gives birth to a cat, a
dog sires another dog, a bird lays an egg and when it hatches it is another
bird that comes out, etc. A man has a
son and that son is a man like his father.
This is the sense in which Jesus is God’s Son and in this sense of the
word God has only the One Son, the Son Who is God as His Father is God. ὁμοούσιον was the best word for this because
it guarded against the Arian heresy that Jesus is of a similar but different
and lesser nature to God the Father without lending any support to the
Sabellian heresy which stresses the unity in nature of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit to the point that it denies the distinction between the Persons.
There is another way in which the Creed expresses the truth
that Jesus’ Sonship to the Father is the kind of Sonship that means that He
like His Father is God and this is the word “begotten”. In the English text of the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this word appears three times. The first of these is when it says that
Jesus Christ is “the only-begotten Son of God”. Here “only-begotten” is the translation of τὸν
μονογενῆ, the same word that is translated this way in the Authorized Bible in
John 3:16. In the last century or so a
consensus has arisen among New Testament Greek scholars this is a
mistranslation based upon a mistaken etymology and that this word is better
understood as meaning “unique” or “one of a kind”. This consensus is wrong, but even if it were
correct it would not apply to the other two instances of “begotten” for in
these the word γεννηθέντα is used which is the aorist passive participle of the
verb which means “beget”. While this
verb when used of the relationship between two created beings signifies that
the begetter existed before the begotten when used of the Eternal Uncreated
Father and His Eternal Uncreated Son it indicates the priority of the Father in
the sense that He is the Source of the Son and the Son comes from Him but not
priority in any temporal sense. That
there never was a time before the Father had His Son is, indeed, what the two
uses of “begotten” signify, the first by saying that the Son was begotten of
the Father “before all worlds”, that is to say, before Creation, of which time
is a dimension, the second by saying that “begotten” does not mean “created”. Theologically, this truth is usually
referred to as the “eternal generation” of the Son, although the term filiation
is also used.
These truths, that Jesus as the Son comes from the Father in
such a way that What the Father is, God, He, the Son, is also are simply stated
in each of the expressions “God of God”, “Light of Light” and “Very God of Very
God”.
In this Article of the Creed we also affirm the Son’s
Lordship. Saying that Jesus Christ is
Lord can be another way of affirming His deity. To avoid profaning the divine Name, the custom
had developed in the Hebrew tradition of saying the word that means “Lord”
instead when reading the Old Testament text. When the Old Testament was translated into
the Greek Septuagint this custom influenced the translators to put κύριος in
the place of the divine Name and this practice persists into our English
translation where the divine Name is transliterated as Jehovah or Jah in only a
small handful of instances but otherwise rendered LORD spelled in all capitals
to distinguish where the Name of God is what is indicated from places where אֲדֹנָי
appears in the Hebrew text in which cases only the L is capitalized. When the New Testament calls Jesus κύριος,
sometimes this word has the weight that it has in the LXX when it stands in for
the Name of God, at other times it is used in a more literal sense of “Ruler” or
“Master”. These meanings overlap, of
course – Jesus as God is the Ultimate Sovereign Ruler of all – but there is a
real distinction. Generally, when Jesus is
declared to be Lord in a confessional sort of way (Rom. 10:9) the emphasis is
upon His deity, when is spoken of as Lord in a more personal sort of way, the
emphasis is upon His authority in His relationship with His disciples. In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the
word “Lord” is qualified by the number “One”.
This is directly parallel to how the Creed declares God to be One in the
first Article about the Father. In the
Nicene Creed, therefore, the emphasis in affirming Jesus’ Lordship is upon His
deity. The Apostles’ Creed, however,
which qualifies the word “Lord” with the possessive “our”, places the emphasis
in His Lordship upon His relationship of authority to we who confess Him as
such. The two versions of the Creed,
therefore, complement each other, and present both aspects of Jesus’ Lordship
as it is found in the New Testament.
The final affirmation in this portion of the Creed in the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan version is “through whom all things were made”. This wording identifies the Son’s role in
Creation in terms of instrumentality or means.
The Son is the instrument through Whom the Father created all things. This is what we find asserted by St. John in
the third verse of His Gospel “all things were made by him; and without him was
not anything made that was made”. This
follows shortly after St. John’s introduction of Jesus as “the Word” Who was “in
the beginning” with God and Who “was God”.
This alludes to the first chapter of Genesis which also starts with the
words “in the beginning” and in which God creates all things through the means
of His Word.
The second Article is all about the deity of Jesus Christ, the
Son of God. We shall, Lord willing,
next look at the third Article, in which the focus shifts to His humanity, God
the Son become Man.
,
(2) Eusebius was present at the Council of Nicaea as Bishop of Caesarea but finished writing his History just prior to the Council and concluded his narrative with the triumph of Constantine over his rivals.
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