The
New Testament : A covenant with all peoples
A
New Teaching? Paul sharing in Athens
•
Philosophers' asked,
“May we know what this new teaching
is that you are presenting?' (Acts 17.19).
•
May have sounded
new because N.T. writers rarely expressed their ideas in philosophical
terms.
•
It was not new
to the Jewish people.
•
The understanding
of God in the N.T. is fundamentally that of the covenant people,
the Jews, whom God had called into special obedience and service
on behalf of the whole world.
•
They in turn offered
themselves in holiness to God with laws to help and guide them.
•
The N.T. writers
believed that God had now extended that covenant to also include,
by faith, Gentiles
•
Holiness remained,
but the laws were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of
holiness.
God
Portrayed
•
God portrayed in
the N.T. is very like that of Jewish O.T. scripture.
•
God is faithful,
wise, and true; God is merciful and just, even in anger; God is the
God of peace, of hope, of comfort, and of love.
•
Above all God seeks
to bring healing and redemption to the whole world.
•
It is never questioned
or doubted there is only one who is truly God.
•
Other so-called
gods are foolish and dangerous inventions
Jesus
and God
•
Without compromising
God's unique nature, Jesus is related to God in an equally
unique way.
•
N.T. writers claimed
Jesus as the fulfilment of the purpose of God from the moment of creation
onwards, as well as the fulfilment of specific texts.
•
Sometimes this
is without any reference to the original meaning of the text.
•
e.g. Mt 1.23
quotes a text that referred originally to the birth of a royal child
and may in the Hebrew have had no reference to a virginal conception,
and
•
Mt 2.15 quotes
a passage from Hosea that referred originally to the Exodus.
• In
this way they could emphasize how exactly Jesus, in his life, death,
and resurrection, was the continuation and fulfilment of the purpose
of God throughout the whole Bible.
Jesus,
Father & Spirit
•
How can Jesus be
so closely related to God and yet still be so unequivocally human?
•
The relationship
as one of Father and Son expressed the dynamic nature of that
relationship.
•
The N.T. also continues
the Biblical portrayal of God present to people in the world as Holy
Spirit:
•
He is God present
to particular people inspiring and changing them in many ways.
•
The word “spirit”
meant originally “breath”, and hence it came to express the way in
which God breathes into and thus inspires such people as prophets.
•
The Jews
believed that the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn, as
part of the punishment, at the time of the Exile.
•
But Christians
believed that the Holy Spirit had been present to the
life of Jesus and was continuing to inspire and change their own lives
with gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5.22).
All
this left two major questions :
•
How can the nature of God and human nature be combined in the one
person of Jesus? That is the question of Christology
•
How can God be absolutely and uniquely one and yet be Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit? That is the question of the
Trinity
All
about the Person of Christ
•
Those were to be
major questions in the future.
•
From the outset,
it was the person of Christ , much more
even than his teaching, that made the Christian story of God take
off in such a radically new way.
•
Far more than that,
it remains the reason why Christians find their access to God
in and through the risen and ascended Christ
The
Person of Christ : How is Jesus related to God?
The
Arian Dispute
•
About 318CE, the Bishop of Alexandria,
Alexander, called his clergy together and gave them a lecture on the
unity that exists in the Trinity in which all Three Persons are
equally God.
•
A presbyter present disagreed so profoundly
with the Bishop that he stood up and said so:
“
If we say that Jesus is the Son of the Father, it means that
he was brought into being [begotten] at some point in time; from
which it follows that there was a time when he did not exist [and
is thus not equal to God]”
(Socrates, 1.5)
•
The presbyter who said these words was
Arius, originator of doctrine of Arianism.
•
His view that the Son had not existed
eternally in the Godhead was summarized in a Greek phrase “there
was a time when he was not”. It was the beginning of a major uproar
and conflict
Man
and God?
•
Christians had to account for the fact
that Jesus was clearly a real human being and yet that he had
brought into the world through his own person the effect
and power of God, whom he called Father.
•
He was therefore distinct from God and
yet brought God life in and through himself.
•
How could the nature of God be united
with human nature in the person of Jesus Christ in such a way that
God was not compromised or diminished (like a genie stuffed into a
bottle) and that the humanity of Jesus was not overwhelmed (like dry
land submerged under a flood)?
•
All the different views held by people,
on who or what Jesus really was, had in common the belief that it
is simply impossible for God to be united with a human life and body.
•
Their present-day equivalents are likely
to believe that God does not even exist, so that the claim that Jesus
was uniquely related to God is held to have arisen from mistaken early
believers who wanted to give Jesus the highest possible honour after
his death, rather like a posthumous prize or decoration.
Difficulty
of Understanding
•
The search for the best (or the least
inadequate) way to understand God in relation to Jesus still goes
on today.
•
The challenge lies in the fact that
all the views are correct, but only up to a point.
•
Jesus resembled many of the ways in
which, at that time, it was believed that people could be God-related,
and yet, crucially, he was unlike all of them.
•
And the word “crucially” is literally
meant. It comes from the Latin crux , “a cross”: Jesus had
died on a cross and yet was known to be alive.
The
Critical Fact of the Resurrection
•
Through those events, the way for others
to pass from death to life was opened up: ‘‘If the Spirit of him who
raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from
the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit
that dwells in you” (Romans 8.11).
•
That could not be achieved by any human,
no matter how gifted. It could be achieved only by God and even then,
not by God working at a distance, like a football manager on the bench,
shouting and gesticulating while the players get on with the game.
•
It could only be achieved (if it was
achieved; and after the resurrection, Christians had no doubt that
it had been achieved) by God becoming involved in the game
and taking it to a different result.
•
But it was exactly that which seemed
impossible: how could God be involved in a human life and
death without becoming less than God? That was the question raised
by Arius.
Jesus
and God : One Being With the Father
Jesus
worshipped as God
•
In the Roman Emperor Trajan's reign
(98-117CE), Pliny , one of his provincial governors,
wrote to him to ask how he should deal with some apparently disloyal
people called Christians.
•
Those who, under threat, worshipped
the statue of the emperor and cursed Christ were fine, but was he
right to execute those who would not?
•
According to Pliny, “the whole of their
guilt, or their error, was that they were in the habit of meeting
on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate
verses a hymn to Christ as though to a God” (Letter 96).
•
In fact they were singing to Christ,
not as though to a God, but to God.
•
Any account, like that of Arius, saying
of Christ that he was less than God, did not seem to them to do justice
to the evidence — and evidence not just from the past but also of
the present in the continuing Christian experience of God.
•
To them, the only account that seemed
to be true was to say of Jesus (as a creed later did say) that he
was “ God from God, light from light, true
God from true God ” (the so-called Nicene creed
, though its final form came from a later Church Council).
Inadequate
Solutions?
•
Neither Arius nor all those who earlier
attempted to associate Jesus with God by adoption
or promotion seemed to do justice to person
and the events that had brought the Church into being.
•
It was not enough to say that Jesus
was like God in some of the things that
he did and said, or that he became like God
in his own nature — or, in the Greek of the time, that he was homoiousios
(of a like nature or substance).
•
Jesus had done what only God can do:
he had brought people from wrong to right (from sin to salvation)
and from death to a new life beyond death.
•
So, people felt, he could not have done
that unless he was of the same nature or
substance (homoousios) as
God; the Nicene Creed therefore continues, “ …
begotten, not made, of one being (homoousios)
with the Father; through him all things
were made ”.
•
Those two Greek words (homoiousios
and homoousios),
differing by only a single letter, the Greek iota (i) point
to the storm that raged around Arius.
•
Yet in fact the whole Christian
understanding of God turns on the issue.
The
Necessity – Jesus had to BE God
•
Jesus did not live and act more or less
like God in dealing with human need: to deal with
that need, it had to be God who was at work in conjunction
with the humanity of Jesus.
•
Jesus did not become God, because
the One united uniquely to the human nature of Jesus had always been
God, pre-existing his manifestation, or incarnation, in the person
of Christ.
•
What God always is, united now with
the human person of Jesus, must always have been.
•
Only if that were so could Jesus have
rescued people in the way that he did.
•
As Athanasius, (the
main opponent of Arius) put it, God became human in order that humans
might become God: drowning people cannot be rescued by exhortations
from the shore, but only by one who knows and understands their crisis,
and who enters into it in order to do for them what they cannot do
for themselves.
•
For that reason, the Creed goes on:
‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the
power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of Virgin Mary, and was
made man ”.
Jesus,
an Object of Worship
•
In gratitude for this, those who see
the point and realize what has been done for them, kneel before Christ
as the Wise Men had knelt in the stable, in worship, adoration, and
love.
•
If Christ is not truly God, that worship
is a kind of idolatry.
A
Unique Experience
•
For reasons of rescue / salvation, Christians
knew that Jesus was both uniquely God and man
•
In all the many speculations about the
ways in which people might be inspired or possessed by God, nothing
like this had ever been claimed, let alone described.
•
The Christians were left with the impossibility
of trying to explain how this unique conjunction of the human and
the divine in one person could have happened.
An
Analogy of God the Information Source?
•
To some extent, it is easier now than
then. Information, in the technical sense, acts as a constraint over
all human behaviour, without destroying that humanity.
•
From the record, it is clear that God
was, at least in the belief of Jesus, an invariant source of information
acting as a constant constraint over his humanity without in any way
destroying it.
•
The source of information,
therefore, remained independent while being wholly and effectively
present in the transformation of that life.
•
Hebrews 4.15 put the point more colloquially
by saying that Jesus was tempted in every way like us and yet was
without sin.
•
That creates the paradox: God is both
wholly present and wholly absent, both within the person of Jesus
and yet apart from Jesus, being addressed as Father and supporting
him as the Spirit.
•
How could God live, suffer, and die
in a small corner of Palestine
while at the same time running
the universe?
•
It was in answer to that question that
the understanding of God as Trinity began
to emerge.
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