(12) What I Believe “And in Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten of the Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not created, of the same essence as the Father, through whom all things were created.” If we are honest, this sounds a bit like gobbledygook. What is one to make of this metaphysical language? Today, we no longer all have Plato as part of our conscious worldview and so the language of being, substance, real, and ideal or the difference between begotten and made may seem to us a bit overwrought. This, however, was the language game of the third century. Does this mean that in affirming the trajectory of the Creed that we are also obliged to buy into this Platonic metaphysic? I don’t think so. The question the Creed is trying to answer is what is the relationship of Jesus to the Father? It does so as a math problem. How can Christians confess they are monotheists (that they believe in one God) and still also affirm that Jesus too is God, and the Holy Spirit as well? How does 1 = 3? Or 3 = 1? Let me problematize this further: how does the Jesus we know from the Gospels relate to the portraits of God found in the Jewish Scriptures? Their characters are quite different. A common solution is to speak of the attributes of God and then divvy them up between the various members of the Trinity, this way the Father gets to be the bad cop, Lawgiver and Judge, while Jesus gets to be the good cop, sweet and nice as your Uncle Bob, and the Holy Spirit, well, the Holy Spirit is just a mystery. This has never been a satisfying alternative. I would like to suggest that we begin our reflections on this language of the Creed from another direction. Let’s assume for the moment that the question is valid: What do Jesus and the Father have in common? Let’s also assume that we take our definition of the Father from the Old Testament. The clear answer is not a whole lot. This is why so many have forsaken the Creed. God is just too much of an ogre in so many Old Testament stories and so unlike Jesus that to try and say all this theological Platonic mish-mash doesn’t make any sense. But what if what the Creed is asserting is that Jesus defines the character of the Father for us? What if it is Jesus’ character that we can say is the character of the Father? What if it is in Jesus’ life, ministry and teaching we can say we see something divine? Perhaps it is our definition of God that has to change. Rather than starting with that which we think is God (nouns and adjectives) and then trying to fit Jesus into that picture, what if we started the other way around? What if we begin with Jesus and say that if “we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father?” What if we don’t take our definition of the Father from every Old Testament text that refers to “God” and instead ask about the character of the Father as we see Jesus? This, I think, is what the framers of the Creed were seeking to accomplish (or at least that is my ‘in bonum partem’ reading of the Creed). What if we used the language of the Fourth Gospel where what the Son sees the Father doing that he does, or what the Son hears the Father saying, that he says? What if, instead of metaphysical language we were to use the language of the social sciences, the language of imitation (or mimesis) to describe the relation of the Son to the Father? What if we asserted that just as we humans are hard wired to imitate each other, that we cannot but imitate one another, so also Jesus was an imitative person, but that instead of imitating those around him, he imitated the One he believed in as God? What if we were to argue that it was as a human imitating God that Jesus’ character reveals God’s character, that by knowing Jesus we know the Father? Would we not then be able to say Jesus revealed the divine in his life and that to know Jesus is to know the Father? What if we were to say that real divinity only comes through real humanity? What if we were to say that the Creed with its “who for us (di’ humas) humans..Jesus became enfleshed (sarxothenta), just like us? What if we were to say that the Creed is saying two dialectical things at once: In Jesus we see what God is really like, but we also see who we are really like as well? What if the Creed is moving us to say that God is best described as God in relationship? If we take Jesus’ ministry as a starting point, then cannot we not say that God is revealed as God in our true humanness and that this true humanness is best revealed as compassion for the lowly, healing for the diseased, love for the unlovely, caring for the needy? Can we now say that describing God as a jumble of non related nouns and adjectives (righteous, holy, just, true, eternal, etc) lacks any real sense of humanness? Do we describe one another that way? If I ask you about your significant other won’t you say “Well, they are like…” Is it not the case that all the Creed is seeking to affirm with its old language of metaphysics that Jesus is “like” the Father? How alike are they? Down to the tiniest bit. Their character is substantively identical. In fact, they are so similar, Jesus did such a good job imitating the Father, as a human being (!) that the Father, upon raising him from the dead and enthroning Jesus at His right hand said “By the way, you look so much like me that people may confuse us so I will just give you my name, the Unpronounceable Name (“the name above all names”) which now becomes the name “Jesus.” This means that we can no longer look to texts to give us the character of God, of the Abba, we must begin by looking to Jesus. This does not mean that God, the Abba was not working throughout Israel’s history. It does mean that we have to discriminate which texts reflect this Abba and which ones don’t. It means using Jesus as our ‘critical’ lens when reading any text or understanding any statement about God. It means that if it looks like Jesus, then it is most likely God. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t. This is what I think the Creed might be saying to us today about ‘homoousias’ that Jesus was ‘of the same substance of the Father.’ We no longer need fret over the metaphysics of the language, we may rather rejoice in the epistemological revolution that is occurring in the Creed. Jesus is the redefinition of God.
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:03:14 +0000
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