the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father,
Through him all things were made,
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
from the Nicene Creed
A true reformation of Christianity requires an examination of what are considered the basic, core beliefs of Christianity, and by core beliefs, I mean what we believe to be true about Jesus. If one is Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or from a mainline Protestant denomination you will recognize the second article of the Nicene Creed quoted above. Even if you don't recognize it or have never said it, this creed and these words have shaped how most (not all) Christians throughout the world understand who Jesus is.
The potency of this creed is such that reception into most mainline denominations is contingent on believing or at least professing this creed and acknowledging the premise established in its second article, but this creed has a less than stellar history.
This creed was intended to unify Christianity behind a common belief system that identified who was or wasn't a true Christian back in the early days of legalized Christianity in the latter part of the Roman Empire. It's establishment as the standard Christian belief, however, would result in the persecuted becoming the persecutors a few decades after its promulgation in 325 CE. There are blood stains on its history.
The simple fact is that this creed tells us nothing. It is a remarkably void of meaning and guidance. It is a pathetic attempt to explain the truly mysterious and ineffable source of our being by couching the reality of who Jesus is in mystical terms in order to satisfy and protect the imperial visage and power of the Roman emperor, Constantine I, under whose watchful eye it was developed. Most importantly for the early Church, it managed to secure imperial patronage for the emperor having forfeited the required title of "Son of God," an identity held by previous emperors. What wasn't forfeited was the title of pontiff maximus or acting as the divinely appointed high priest or from the Christian viewpoint, serving as Christ's regent on earth, a title later transferred to the Bishop of Rome as the Vicar of Christ. If any reader would like to pursue this history further, I recommend two books by Charles Freeman, "The Closing of the Western Mind" and "AD 381."
The potency of this creed is directly related to its use as the premise to maintain control over those claiming to be Christian and to give authority to the hierarchal structure of mainline Christianity. It continues to be the agent by which mainline churches identify who is or isn't a Christian. And even if it is not regularly spoken or used in worship services or strongly enforced today, it continues to define what orthodox (right-minded) Christianity is. As noted above, in many denominations one cannot be received as a member, identified as a Christian, or become a pastor or a priest unless one can confess this creed and protect its authority as the Church's primary doctrinal position on who God in Christ is.
I'm an Episcopalian (until I'm thrown out) and fully recognize and understand the prevalence of this creed throughout the liturgies found in the Episcopal Church's "Book of Common Prayer." I've heard people whole-heartedly stand by this creed even though I am fairly confident they don't understand it or know anything about it. It's treated in most liturgical churches as a Church's Pledge of Allegiance said every Sunday, but this creed is so unlike the Pledge of Allegiance to the USA flag which tells one something about who Americans are and how they're supposed to act. This creed does none of that.
THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS AND THE TEACHINGS ABOUT JESUS
At this point, I need to differentiate between Christianity and what I understand to be the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Throughout many of my posts, I have differentiated the teachings of Jesus as opposed to the teachings about Jesus as found in the canonical New Testament. Let me be clear that I am not advocating throwing out the New Testament canon or throwing away the Nicene Creed, but rather I am advocating a need to understand them and learn what they are and what they are not in the light of the knowledge we possess today; knowledge about ourselves, our world, and the universe we live in. In the case of the Nicene Creed, I would simply shelve it as a historical artifact amongst any number of documents associated with the bloody history of the Church.
Christianity and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are not exactly synonymous. Christianity contains the teaching of Jesus, but most Christian teachings go far beyond them to the point of making them irrelevant. Christianity puts on less than equal footing the teachings of Jesus with the teachings about Jesus. One can easily differentiate between the teaching of Jesus and the teachings about Jesus in the Gospels, if one wants to. Thomas Jefferson notably did back in his day. It is the teaching about Jesus in Christianity that have received the greatest attention and such teachings continue to dominate Christian dialogue. In my opinion, that needs to change if there is to be any hope for a reformation. We must be able to differentiate between the two types of teaching and decide that the teachings of Jesus carry more weight than the speculative teachings about Jesus.
So the basic question at the heart of this call to reformation is the question that began to derail Christianity beginning around the start of the second century C. E. and brought us to the point of no return during the Council of Nicea at the start of the fourth century C.E.
WHO IS JESUS?
To even ask this question in the twenty-first century feels odd because if we were talking about anyone else the answer would be a simple and straightforward, "Jesus is a man; as in, Jesus is a human being." That isn't hard to say unless you consider yourself a Christian; in which case, you are likely to add that Jesus is the Son of God. But let's stick with the provable for the moment.
It is important to keep Jesus human. Jesus is a human being. Period. Full stop.
Let us stay with that because keeping Jesus human makes being a human a good thing.
As I said in my previous post, in order to sift through eighteen hundred or more years of doctrine and theology, I may inject some new or newly brought to light ideas that have been around for some time.
Allow me to inject and offer a much simpler creed for consideration as we start the sifting through process:
WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT JESUS IS TRUE ABOUT US.
Or let's try turning this around and say,
WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT OUR NATURE IS TRUE ABOUT JESUS' NATURE.
Compare those statements with the second article of the Nicene Creed. Are they in any way comparable? If so, where do they connect? Where do they disconnect?
Let's face it. There are some glaring disconnects. If I would have quoted the full second article of the creed, one could recognize being born, suffering, dying and possibly resurrection as things Jesus experienced and that we have and will eventually experience. Other than that there is nothing.
Which is easier to wrap one's head and heart around, a Jesus who comes down from heaven or a Jesus who is one of us and understands exactly who we are and, more importantly, raises us up to understand who we are and whose we are?
It might be easier to want to believe in a Jesus who came down from heaven, because in that sense, we're off the hook trying to act or be like Jesus. The fact is one has to suspend a lot of what we know about being a human being if we want to keep Jesus in the "TRUE GOD" category of Christian doctrine.
I can hear the questions, but what about...? You can fill in anything you like in that question: such as, what about the stories of his birth? What about the miracles? What about the resurrection?
These are all good questions; all necessary questions, and questions that need to be addressed, but in due time.
THE GOSPELS AS EDITORIALS
If I were to define Holy Scripture in the light of how we understand literature in the twenty-first century, I would define all of scripture, all writings considered holy, as "other," as being editorial in nature. They are commentaries on what people thought about God or the gods in relationship to us humans and why the human condition is such as it is. Yes, they are, at times, based on historical or reflect common events. Frequently they engage in creating speculative stories about why we exist to illustrate how we should relate to each other and to the source of our being, but fundamentally they are editorial and they are largely editorials that have been edited throughout their existence by scholars. There is nothing magical or mysterious about their being scripture or that any of them are the direct "Word of God." They are, in fact, words about God and, more importantly, they are words about who we are in this vast universe.
All writing is inspired, including this post. I'm not claiming that God is directly inspiring me to write what I'm writing, but the topic of God is, the question who is Jesus is, the topic of Christianity is, the topic of religion as a whole is. Such topics are inspiring in themselves. I believe in inspiration.
And what I'm writing is editorial by nature. That's what all human efforts at literature is; a way of expressing who we are, what we feel, what we think and a way of figuring ourselves out.
This only becomes problematic when, as twenty-first century individuals, we start trying to relate to the editorial perspective of someone who is writing from a first and second century perspective of their world and trying to make it relevant to the world we live in.
Admittedly, I am walking a theological tightrope here, but stay with me.
What I am not saying is that the Gospels are false or were written as an attempt to mislead us. The authors understood why they were writing in the way they wrote. They understood metaphor, the significance of applying numerology and astrology in their world and they used them, editorially, to explain the experience of Jesus. If they mislead us today, it is because of the way we were taught to understand them and to believe such indoctrinated understandings as truth.
Let's take the birth of Jesus as told in the Gospel of Luke and Matthew.
In the first century CE, very few people would have possessed an understanding that all humans are alike. Civilization in any part of the world, at the time, would have been extremely stratified socially. Slaves were the predominant social class of the day. Slaves were dispensable. Human existence was precarious at best and many lived by hook or by crook.
If someone was going to address or change the living conditions of the time, they had to be an extreme exception; especially, if they came from a class other than those in power. Added to this was the view of human suffering based on sinfulness or incurring the wrath of the gods for some reason, which could only be appeased through sacrifice. A view that would shape Christianity's understanding of Jesus' death. People didn't just raise themselves to a higher level of being unless the gods were involved. Look at any religion of the time. Any recognized founder or leader had to be raised up to that level by the god or appointed by God, and such resurrections were largely viewed as the result of direct, divine intervention.
Saying that Jesus was the Messiah after being born of a carpenter and his wife from the dusty Galilean outpost of Nazareth would have had little appeal if that is all that was known of his origins. So it stands to reason that there must be more, and these early sincere authors of the Gospels garnered speculative meanings from other known events of his life that could be useful, like being born in Bethlehem and spending some of his early years in Egypt.
Without any angelic embellishments or travels by seers from the East, these events are likely to have happened. By themselves there is nothing mystical or mysterious about them.
The strange thing about the synoptic Gospels is that the earliest, Mark, makes no attempt to explain Jesus' origin but rather, in keeping with much of Hebrew scripture's depiction of notable persons, has him appear on the world stage when he starts his ministry. It would appear to me that is because Mark's audience was primarily Jewish and saw themselves as Jewish followers of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both talk about Jesus' birth but from very different perspectives and with an obvious agenda detected in the way they editorialize the event. Did angels appear to shepherds? Did wise men make their way to offer gold, frankincense, and myrrh? Probably not and there is definitely nothing in the historical record or any other human experience to back any of those stories up.
The most disturbing feature of Matthew's and Luke's description of Jesus' birth is that it is not a fully human birth at all. And the reason, in their minds, was that Jesus just couldn't be exactly one of us at all. Jesus had to have a direct link to God, himself, if he, like other legendary figures in Greek, Roman and Egyptian lore was to find acceptance in the peoples of those regions and those religions.
Think about that for a moment; in terms of our understanding of things today.
What does this "necessity" of Jesus having to be a demi-god say about us?
It certainly paints the male of our species in less than a capable light.
Are we so unclean, so filthy and unsalvageable that God could only "come down" and impregnate an innocent, young, virgin girl to make sure their offspring, his Son, would be the spotless Lamb of God portrayed in the Gospel of John?
That's the stuff of ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions of the day. It certainly wasn't a Jewish notion.
It only makes sense given the time in which it was written and the audience that would have received such stories. These stories are editorial commentaries; in that, if Christianity was to make any inroads into the pagan world of ancient Greece and Rome, there needed to be some semblance, some reference to their understanding of how a divine presence is manifested in a human being to make the story of Jesus palatable to the religious tastes of that audience.
Theologically speaking in the twenty-first century, it is vitally important to understand that reasoning and to understand and accept Jesus as having a biological human father who impregnated his biological human mother; that he is not the product of a divine tryst. It makes no sense today, and we shouldn't try to act like it does. That is not to say, we can't find meanings in these stories. Mythic language is used to convey truths that are not readily explained by mere facts. Myths are highly editorial about the human condition.
The true Jesus didn't come down from heaven. He was raised up. He had to grow up just like the rest of us guys. And Jesus had to evolve into the person we know as the Christ. There is nothing magical about or mystical about his origins other than the mystery surrounding our own existence, and that is mysterious enough.
The importance of Jesus being just like us and we being just like Jesus is that in Jesus of Nazareth God, that Being in which we live and move and have our being, re-establishes and shows who we truly are and how we ought to act.
IF IT IS TRUE ABOUT JESUS, IT IS TRUE ABOUT US.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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