The Apostles’ Creed has more to say about Jesus than God, the Holy Spirit, or anything else.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.

…

I Believe in the Holy Spirit.

Yet the nature of Jesus as ‘his only Son our Lord’ was the focus of much controversy in the early church. The council of Nicaea was called to address the issue and the Nicene Creed, both 325 and 381, add much detail to the description.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
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:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.

…

And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life.
He proceeds from the Father and the Son,
and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
He spoke through the prophets.

Concerning the person of Jesus 3 lines become 13. The description of the Holy Spirit also required elucidation – one simple statement becomes five lines. The Trinity is not an easy concept to understand. It wasn’t easy in the first few centuries of the church and isn’t easy today.

Without claiming to find modern science in the pages of the Bible, Andy Walsh (Faith Across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science) suggests that science – particularly quantum physics and the nature of light – can help us understand more about the nature of the trinity, and particularly mutual divine and human nature of Jesus as “true God from true God” … become incarnate and made man. Andy reflects: “While Jesus was on Earth, he described himself as “the light of the world” (John 8:12). Fitting, then, that we should examine different properties of light in order to understand Jesus better. … I find our present understanding of light provides a conceptual framework for further exploring what Jesus was like.” (p. 87)

Light is not easy to explain. At times it behaves like particles – photons – that can be counted one by one. Yet these photons interfere – even with themselves – and behave like waves. Pass them through slits onto a screen and they diffract (the double slit experiment). Each individual photon goes to one place,  but send a thousand through one at a time and an interference pattern emerges. Cover one slit and a completely different pattern is seen – even though in both experiments the photons can be separated by seconds – they don’t interact with each other at all. The same thing happens with electrons. It boggles the mind because photons, like other elementary particles including electrons and protons, behave in ways that do not fit into the neat categories we have based on our “normal” and macroscopic intuition. In fact, if we rely on our experience, the properties seem incoherent and irreconcilable.

As a physical chemist and spectroscopist, I find the wave-particle duality of electrons and photons a useful analogy to help understand a number of theological mysteries – and have used it before. Andy Walsh uses it to help understand the nature of Jesus as both human and divine.

There are three principle points Walsh makes.

First – we have to go with the data and not our reason and intuition. Walsh notes: “Just as we looked at various experiments that reveal properties of light, we’ll need to look at the data for Jesus we have from the Bible.” (p. 96)  Some of the images we see of Jesus – emphasizing his human or divine characteristics – seem contradictory and may not fit our image of God.  But Jesus, himself teaches us what it means to be human and divine. He also teaches us much about the nature of God.

Second – while we might tend to connect the three persons of the Trinity with the discrete particle-like nature of light, the properties of waves may also provide a useful analogy for how three can be one and one can be three. Although this seems contradictory from our particle-like understanding of personhood – it is not contradictory behavior for waves. Two or three waves combine to become one, one wave is easily decomposed into two or three or more.  Now God isn’t a wave (as Walsh would agree) and the analogy is far from perfect – but it does point to the fact that three in one is not foreign to our experience if we know where to look.

Third – we can take advantage of interference to get a clearer picture of Jesus and of God. Large telescopes composed of multiple small mirrors rely on interference to produce a clearer image.

This ability to make a big telescope out of many small ones is quite handy, since it can be much more expensive to build a single large telescope than the equivalent array of smaller ones. It also handily paints a picture of how we can work together to understand God. Rather than trying to be the big telescope and see everything for ourselves, we can instead compare notes, see where our theological signals reinforce each other and where they cancel each other out, and infer from that combination a better picture of God than any one of us could see on our own. This is not equivalent to a lowest common denominator approach with a final image that is simply whatever is common to all observers. The interference from the combined signals is instead a careful and rigorous reconciliation of data from telescopes that are tracking together to look at the same part of the sky. (p. 101)

Among other thing those Christians who study God’s creation (scientists) and those who study Scripture (theologians and biblical scholars) working together should come up with a clearer picture than either group could alone.

Walsh concludes:

Having reflected on the nature of Jesus as both God and man and determined that, as with light, we need to let Jesus define our categories rather than be restricted to inadequate ones, we can apply those categories to our own lives. If Jesus is the ultimate expression of what it means to be human, then it is reasonable to orient our lives so that we are following his example. (p. 103)

It is not enough to understand God or Jesus better. We have to follow through and commit to that understanding of reality.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

A Place to Start, by Mike Glenn

Most of us have heard of the innkeeper in the Christmas story. Poor Mary, pregnant and tired, has been dragged to Bethlehem by Joseph because that’s where his family is from and according to Caesar Augustus, everyone had to go to their hometown to pay their taxes. When the couple arrives in Bethlehem, Mary finds out Joseph hasn’t called ahead for reservations.

I bet that was a fun discussion…

Anyway, the mean old innkeeper won’t help out Mary and Joseph and sends them to the barn and sweet Baby Jesus was born in a stable and spent the night in a manger.

Some of us met the innkeeper when we were given the role of the innkeeper in our church’s Christmas pageant. We would borrow our father’s bathrobe, tie a towel around our head, and when our moment came, when would shake our head vigorously telling Mary and Joseph there was no room in the inn.

No one liked the innkeeper. He’s one of those characters we booed and heckled when they walk onto the stage. He deserves it. After all, what kind of a man makes a baby sleep in a stable?

There’s only one problem with this story.

The innkeeper isn’t in the story.

Go ahead. Look it up. You’ll find the story in Luke 2.

I’ll wait.

Done?

See, I told you. The innkeeper is never mentioned at all. We’re simply told Mary placed Jesus in the manger because there was no room in the inn.

We’ve made up the rest of the story. We assume that if there’s an inn, there must be an innkeeper and if there’s an innkeeper, he must be a bad and hateful man.

But what if it wasn’t that way?

What if the innkeeper was a good guy who was trying to make the best of a bad situation? (Hey, since we’re making up the story anyway, we can make it up anyway we want!)

Work with me. What if, when the innkeeper realizes how pregnant Mary is, decides his crowded inn was no place for a new mother and her little baby boy. What if he covered the hay with quilts and blankets and made his stable as safe and warm as it could be?

What if, like us, he was just trying make the best of a tough situation?

Since that moment, every has complained about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth. “Poor Little Jesus boy, born in a manger.” Mothers have complained. Preachers and theologians have complained. Kings and emperors have found it embarrassing as well.

Everyone complains but Jesus.

For Jesus, the stable in Bethlehem may not have been an award-winning hospital or a five-star hotel. Jesus never asked for any of that. The only thing Jesus was looking for ask was a place to start – nothing more. The stable in Bethlehem was a place to start and that’s all Jesus was looking for.

Abraham was seventy-five years old. Never mind, he was a good place to start.

Moses wasn’t very confident of his leadership skills, but that was OK. He was a good place to start.

Peter wasn’t much of a disciple, but he was a good place to start.

Christmas is about starting.

The good news of Christmas is God is looking for a place to start and He doesn’t seem to be very particular where He starts. He only wants to start.

He can start with a shepherd boy.

He can start with a frustrated German monk.

He can start with anybody, including you and me.

God is working His great work of salvation. Advent reminds us God is always starting new things in any place we let Him.

In his new book, How New is the New Testament?, Don Hagner examines the theme of “newness” in the New Testament.

He concludes that there is both discontinuity and continuity. So far not controversial. The issue is of course “how” new is the New Testament?

Hagner states in conclusion what is new and what strikes the chord of discontinuity, and notice all the “new” things in the era of Jesus:

For our purposes, the significant occurrences of the word “new’ are the following: new creation, new covenant, new wine, new man, new (unleavened) lump, new commandment, new teaching, new name, new song, new Jerusalem, new heavens and new earth.

Beyond terms are concepts, ideas, and many of these are quite useful in scholarship today for creating a narrative that pulls it together:

Beyond the actual use of the word “new,” there are also instances of obvious conceptual reference to new realities: new exodus, new Moses, new Israel, new people, renewed nature, new temple, new law, new priesthood, new high priesthood, new sacrifice, new descendants of Abraham, second Adam, and the dawning kingdom of God itself.

This speaks to discontinuity:

In all these instances, the new implies a significant degree of discontinuity with the old. At the same time, however, because of the connection to the old, the discontinuities paradoxically substantiate the unity of the Bible.

But… with continuity, on the basis of continuity…

As we have frequently noted, the very idea of fulfillment, so important to the NT writers, is itself an expression of continuity. The discontinuity can only be appreciated by a knowledge of the underlying continuity. Newness can only be assessed when compared and contrasted with what preceded. That is why the OT is absolutely indispensable to the understanding of the NT.

What about the continuity?

Through and through the NT is Jewish. A huge amount of material is based directly upon, or simply assumes, continuity with the OT and Judaism. Much of the pervasive continuity is incidental or inconsequential. But much is of determinative and continuing significance for understanding the NT. Starting with creation, monotheism, and the view of God and moving to the covenants made by God with his chosen people, the morality of the law, the prophets, wisdom, the vision of future eschatology, and more, the NT draws heavily on Jewish tradition and the OT—the latter accepted as having divinely inspired authority, if indeed relativized to an extent by the new that has come. A constant indicator of this is the direct use of the Scriptures reflected in the myriad of OT quotations and allusions, but also concepts and Greek terminology via the mediation of the Septuagint and modes of argumentation following rabbinic practice. Even the hermeneutical methods employed by the NT writers in their interpretation of the OT are fundamentally Jewish. In particular, the NT writers often employ typological correspondence between OT events and NT parallels in their use of Scripture.

In his new book, How New is the New Testament?, Don Hagner carries on the good fun at Fuller Seminary in responding kindly to John Goldingay’s Do We Need the New Testament? Hagner says this about the famous saying of Jesus, which reads:

Matthew 13:51-52: Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

Hagner comments:

“Matthew’s Gospel is above all the announcement of something dramatically new, and it is no accident that he refers to what is new first and emphatically. New and old are both important to Matthew, but it is the new that captivates him, and it is above all the new that he writes about in his Gospel” (p. 9).

What happens, all this is leading us to ask, to teaching Old Testament if these New-Thematizers have their way? What happens, as well, to homiletics? What happens to NT exegesis? Can we read the Bible as the apostles read the Bible?

The bottom of this issue is continuity between the testaments (Goldingay, new perspective) or discontinuity (Hagner, old and apocalyptic perspectives). And not all new and new fit on that scale that simply. But, we’ll start there because that’s where Hagner more or less begins.

It is evident that the issue here is not merely sociological but also soteriological and thus an issue of universal significance, for both Jews and Gentiles. The law had only a temporary role to play in the pursuit of righteousness, and that role has come to an end with the coming of Christ. As in so much of what the NT has to say, a key turning point has now been reached in the history of salvation. We are in a new situation…. ‘he radical difference in the new situation is the dynamic by which righteous living is now possible, namely, the empowering of the Holy Spirit, which so characterizes the remarkable newness that arrives with the coming of the Christ. The Holy Spirit thus accomplishes what the law could not (4).

It doesn’t take long for Hagner to enter the fray with some sword flashing:

The balance between covenant grace and works of the law was lost in postexilic Israel. The experience of the exile understandably drove the Jews to observance of the law with a renewed dedication and energy. The result appears to have been a legalism that became dominant and all but obscured the reality of covenant grace. Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising to discover that many or even most Jews of Paul’s day were de facto legalists, in contradiction to a proper understanding of covenant grace. Paul is not necessarily arguing against straw men, as many scholars claim (5).

What now to make of Jesus’ words about rewards? Paul’s statements about rewards and works? John’s relentless requirement to be obedient? Are they all legalists, too? I’ll move on…

Hagner disagrees strenuously with the Paul-within-Judaism crowd of scholars (M Nanos, M Zetterholm, P Eisenbaum, etc).

The so-called “historical” readings of the Paul-within-Judaism scholars can often make sense of the Pauline texts only by means of a tortuous exegesis (9)…. The advocates of the Paul-within-Judaism perspective give insufficient consideration to the complexity of reality. They confront their readers with a kind of rigid either/or mentality that fails to allow tensions, nuances, and subtleties in Paul’s affirmations. There is often a sense in which both sides of an either/or can be true and when it is necessary to conclude both/and. This is especially so in the present case, where we are dealing with the genealogical relationship of promise and fulfillment, the new flower growing out of the old seed (10).

Here, on p. 11, Hagner gives a precis of his fuller argument:

Paul’s Christianity is fulfilled Judaism. It therefore is incorrect to say that Paul left Judaism for Christianity. For Paul, Christianity is the goal of Judaism. But Paul’s fulfilled Judaism is not adequately described as simply one Jewish sect among others. Far from being one form of Judaism among other equally acceptable forms, Christianity for Paul has an absolute character as the expression of the true Judaism of the end time, an eschatologically fulfilled Judaism. “What God was creating through Paul’s mission was not another form of ‘Judaism,’ but something different and new” [citing John Barclay].

The emphasis of Hagner is on what is new and on discontinuity, but it’s not because he denies continuity. His is not an apocalyptic approach but a newness emphasis in the dialectic of new and old, discontinuity and continuity.

Christianity is not other than Judaism: it is the fulfillment of Judaism. The early church was at first entirely Jewish; although it remained a sect within Judaism for a very short time, Christianity is to be understood as a fulfilled Judaism and can be described as a Judaism coming to its divinely intended goal: the accomplishment of salvation through the Messiah’s death and the full inclusion of believing Gentiles in the people of God (20).

What most do not recognize about this debate today is pluralism, which drives many to avoid speaking of discontinuity and fulfillment.

I believe in …
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,

Earlier this year my husband and I took a trip to Germany and visited a number of churches as well as Veste Coburg and Schloss Wartburg where Luther spent time when the Protestant confession was being debated.  He worked on his translation of the Bible into German during this time. Travels around the world and immersion in the history of the Christian church drive home the importance of these two lines in the creed. The church is a unified whole however splintered it may seem.  Shortly after our trip I posted on these two lines in the Creed while reading J.I. Packer’s Affirming the Apostles’ Creed, and Ben Myers’ The Apostles’ Creed. (See Holy Catholic Church, Communion of Saints.) Today I will focus on thoughts from Michael Bird’s What Christians ought to Believe and Derek Vreeland’s primal credo.

Michael Bird defines church as “the visible gathering of the faithful for the representation of Christ’s presence to the world.” (p. 194) He goes on: “To sum up the biblical images for the church, we could say that the church is one people under God, part of the story of God’s plan to repossess the world for himself, living in union with Christ and nourished by the Spirit and projecting God’s salvation into the world.” (p. 196)  We can go further and dig deeper.

The church is one.

The oneness of the church derives from the electing purpose of God, who calls one people to be his treasured possession. … The church has one head in Christ (1  Cor 11:3; Eph 4:15; 5:23; Col 2:10) and so it has only one body (Eph 5:23; Col 1:18, 24). This oneness entails the importance of unity among those who profess faith in God. Just as unity was vital for Israel (2 Chr 30:12; Ps 133), so it is also important for the church (John 17:23; Eph 4:13). (p. 197)

There has always been diversity in the church. Sometimes this diversity is good, bring a variety and depth to our faith. There is a place for Baptist, Catholic, Orthodox, Methodist, Pentecostal expressions of faith. At other times it is divisive, damaging the witness of the body of Christ in the world, particularly when we hold our differences as more important than our unity of belief – a belief expressed concisely in the Apostles’ creed.

Derek Vreeland reflects on this unity of belief.

It seems like the church is anything but one unified entity. Enter the creed. Our shared beliefs in the essentials of the faith as contained in the creed gives common ground for us to stand together and reclaim our oneness as a church. We may have differences on certain practices in the church or second-tier doctrines, but the creed gives us the binding essentials, the top-tier doctrines of the faith. If we believe these things, then we discover our commonality; we are in the same family. … If we allow … non-essential doctrines to become paramount, we erect barriers to others in the body of Christ. If we cling tightly to the creed, it has the power to form us into one church, without sacrificing our diversity. (pp. 110-111)

The church is holy. No one would claim that the church is perfect, but it is called to holiness. Paul writes “To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people” (1 Cor. 1:2)

The church is catholic – that is universal. Paul continues his salutation “together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours.” Michael Bird notes:

There is one church that exists in all places, and yet it adheres to one faith. In the end, the catholicity of the church is simply the universal expression of its oneness. All believers, wherever they are, are one in Christ and therefore one with each other. The concept of “independent” churches then is an oxymoron. (p. 200)

Not only is the the concept of “independent” churches an oxymoron, the slogan popular in the site church movement “one church in two locations” or three or four locations is just plain silly. We are one church in thousands of places – meeting as a local community in fellowship and worship. We need the church both local and catholic.

The communion of saints takes this one step further. Michael Bird notes “This communion exists horizontally among Christians who live and sometimes languish upon the earth and vertically with the departed members who are alive with Christ in heaven.” (p. 201) Victory over death inherent in the resurrection ensures the unity of the church among Christians who live together, Christians who live around the world and Christians who lived and died in the past. The church is the holy body of Christ, united across time and space.

Derek Vreeland sums up:

When we confess, “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,” we walk into a world where hostility has died. This new world has been made possible because God acted in human history and our Lord has become King with all authority in heaven and on the earth. Communion, community, and deeply felt brotherly affection are now possible even among those who were once enemies. Through a common confession we enter into a common communion with all the saints. (p. 123)

We are one church for the world but not of the world. We are called to a mission to … “live and love, serve and sing, preach and teach that Jesus Christ is Lord.” (Bird p. 204)

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

By my friend Allan Bevere:

American Methodists tend to balk at a full embrace of doctrine because they’ve always tended to be more American than Methodist. In popular American culture, anything that gets in the way of unlimited freedom of individual action or opinion is seen as, well, un-American. Thus Christian discipleship must always conform to what good, consumer-oriented and radically democratic Americans think it should.

That idea would strike John Wesley as bizarre. After all, his agenda at the first annual conference in 1744 was centered on considering the questions, What should we teach? How should we teach it? And what should we be doing, practically?

…scripture, tradition and reason are not like three different bookshelves, each of which can be ransacked for answers to key questions. Rather, scripture is the bookshelf; tradition is the memory of what people in the house have read and understood (or perhaps misunderstood) from that shelf; and reason is the set of spectacles that people wear in order to make sense of what they read– though, worryingly, the spectacles have varied over time, and there are signs that some readers, using the “reason” available to them, have severely distorted the texts they were reading. “Experience” is something different again, referring to the effect on readers of what they have read, and/or the worldview, the life experience, the political circumstances, and so on, within which that reading takes place (The Last Word).

“Experience” is far too slippery for the concept to stand any chance of providing a stable basis sufficient to serve as an “authority,” unless what is meant is that, as the book of Judges wryly puts it, everyone should simply do that which is right in their own eyes (The Last Word).

Two Step Miracles, by Mike Glenn

As Christ followers, we find ourselves uncomfortable, even a little embarrassed, by the story of Jesus’ healing of the blind man in Mark 8. You remember the story. A blind man is brought to Jesus, and Jesus pulls him aside. Then, Jesus spits on the man’s eyes (see what I mean?) and rubs the spittle into the eyes of the blind man.

When Jesus asked him if he can see, the man says, yes, he can see, but the people look like trees walking around. So, Jesus rubs the man’s eyes again and then, Praise God, the man is healed.

But it took two steps.

What happened? Did Jesus do something wrong on the first try? Did Jesus fail? What was it about this man’s condition that made this healing story different from the others? In the other stories, Jesus just speaks a word, or touches the suffering person one time. Why did this instance take two touches of Jesus?

To be honest, we know nothing of this man’s condition or what Jesus was trying to accomplish in this man’s life. If we knew some of those details, we might cheer for the impossible victory Jesus accomplished in the man’s life.

All we have is the story. Mark, in his pursuit of brevity, leaves out most of the details. Yet, for some reason, both Mark and the early church thought it was important to preserve this story. There was something about the two-step miracle that rang true for them.

Why?

Because most the miracles we know about take more than one step. Yes, there are those people who are healed instantaneously, and we love to hear their stories over and over again. Why? Because they happen so rarely.

For most of us, miracles take a little longer. Have you ever talked to a recovering addict? They will thank God for the healing in their lives and for relationships that have been restored, but they will also tell you it didn’t happen all at once. Their healing comes one day at a time. On their worst days, their healing comes one part of the day at a time. I’ve had friends who would celebrate staying sober until lunch, and then, pray they could stay sober until dinner. When they made it, they celebrated the miracle given to them one minute at a time.

A damaged marriage is restored, but the couple will tell you it didn’t happen overnight. There were hours of hard conversations about words that hurt, about love left unspoken and promises that were broken. There were long days where neither one of the couple thought the marriage would survive, but they promised to stay together for one more day. Sometimes, they would do it for the children. Sometimes, they would do it because they were just too tired to leave. Whatever the reason, they would stay together. The marriage would survive. They would get their miracle…one day at a time.

When I was fifteen years old, I had my wisdom teeth removed. Everything went fine until one morning I woke up and found my right jaw looked like a softball. My mom rushed me back to the surgeon who took one look at me and sort of laughed. “Mike,” he said, “you healed too fast.” He went on to explain the skin of my gums had quickly repaired the hole he left when he removed my wisdom teeth. The closing of the socket happened before all the bacteria, blood and other nasty things could drain. The socket became infected from the trapped bacteria.

Gross, isn’t it?

The reality of our lives is that we can heal too quickly. In our desire to get through our pain, we don’t give our souls time to drain out all the pain and resentment. As a result, our pain gets infected and becomes bitterness. Our healing doesn’t just stop, but it’s set back. We must go back and start all over again. We can’t heal over pain. Issues we refuse to deal with will, sooner or later, deal with us.

In our hurry to “get over” something or “get through this mess”, we rush the healing process. We refuse to allow God to do the deep work required for our healing. Let me explain.

Let’s say you said something to a friend in the heat of an argument. You apologize. You tell your friend you didn’t mean what you said. You just want your friendship back where it was. In our haste, we confuse apology with repentance (no, they aren’t the same), and we do our best to forget it ever happened.

But it did happen. You did say those things and not because you “lost your temper,” but because you have an anger issue. This anger issue boils up from all those times you felt disrespected and overlooked. You’ll pray that God will help you control your anger, but will you allow Him to bring a deeper healing to your anger issue? Well, that’s another step.

Say you pray God will help you kick your addiction – to porn or alcohol or prescription meds – and that’s one step. Will you allow God to do another step? Will you face the issue that’s causing the hole in your heart that’s creating the desire for the addiction? That’s another step.

All the productivity gurus say the most important thing to do is to simply take the first step. I guess that’s true as far as it goes. The first step is important, but so is the second step and the third and the fourth.

The journey is longer than one step, and most miracles require more than one touch. Sure, take the first step, but don’t stop there. Yes, receive the first touch, but don’t be in a hurry. Jesus has a lot more miracles in store for you, and they may take more than one touch.

By Mike Glenn

Last year, I started working with a trainer. You know, I meet a guy every day at the gym and he tortures me for the next hour. For him, I’m not doing good unless I’m feeling bad. If I haven’t crumpled over in agony, grabbed a torn muscle or thrown up sometime during the hour, he’s failed at his mission.

According to him, all of this is necessary for me to get stronger. The pain has to be endured for the muscle to repair itself from the damage of the workout (yes, you damage your muscles when you work out) and in repairing themselves, grow stronger and bigger.

There is no shortcut. If you want to get stronger, you have to workout. You have to push through your limits if you want to grow. Small victories have to won every day or there’s no victory at all.

Sound familiar?

For all the sermons we preach on faith, for all the discussions we have about “having faith,” you’d think we know how it works. Rather, you would think we know how to live in faith. Few of us do. Every church will have one or two people who know how to live this way. Go to any congregation and find the ones they congregation calls “saints” and you’ll know who they are. That’s the point. Everyone knows who they are because there are so few of them.

Most of us, however, live mundane lives well within the limits our natural abilities. Most of us rarely, if ever, enter to the realm of living in faith.

Part of the reason is most us don’t understand what faith is. Words like “faith” and “believe” are thrown around every day in church, but rarely are they given definitions we can live with in our real world. The writer of Hebrews tell us “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” which means living with the confidence Christ will keep the promises He has made to us and creation.

His creation will be restored to more purely reflect His original intent and those who are redeemed will join Him in His eternal rule. Sadness will be wiped away and death will be defeated. That’s the short version

Then…but not until then. Until then, we’ll have troubles. Jesus promised that. We are, however, to be a good cheer because He’s overcome the world. That’s faith — living joyfully in the middle of all our troubles confident of Christ’s ultimate victory even though it looks like we’re behind on the score board right now.

Faith is a lot more than intense emotion. Anytime we’re called on to “have faith” or “just believe” we think if we can muster up a strong and deep emotion then we really “believe.” But faith is a lot more than feelings.

Faith is alignment.

Faith is making decisions that bring our lives into sync with Jesus’ teachings, molding ourselves into the likeness of the life He lived. Through prayer, study of the Scriptures, and obedience, we bring our lives into greater alignment with Jesus’ word and thus, more under His Lordship.

And we learn by doing small things first. When you begin working out, you don’t start on the heavy end of the dumbbell rack. You start on the light end with the smaller weights. Then, you gradually work your way up.

You don’t run a complete marathon on the day you start running. When you start running, your first goal is the run to the end of the block.

And it’s the same process in following Jesus. You don’t begin preaching to thousands and healing the sick. You begin buy making yourself show up for prayer and Scripture. You help take care of struggling family in your church. Maybe you head to the coast and help with disaster relief efforts. You set up chairs for senior adult dinner. You show up and do the small things first, then you’ll be trusted with greater opportunities.

In doing this, you’ll learn how faith works. Most of the time, the most important thing you do is show up. The Spirit is working all the time drawing broken, confused and lost men and women to Christ. When this happens, our role is to join in the Spirit’s work and become a guide to the lost friend who’s trying to find home.

You would have learned this important lesson in small ways. You would have shown up in all those moments when you didn’t think anything important was going on only to later realized there was something of eternal significance in that moment and you wouldn’t have been anywhere else. You would have learned it by being obedient to Christ, not for reward, but simply because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes, the lesson will be so subtle, you won’t even know you’ve learned it until someone else points it out.

When someone asks how you have become such a deep person of faith, you’ll be surprised anyone considers such a person. If you have an answer at all, you’ll end up saying something like, “I don’t know. I just kept showing up.”

So, where is the next place Jesus wants you to show up? Don’t worry if it’s a little uncomfortable. That’s to be expected. It’s stressing your faith, making your faith sweat a little more each day, that makes you stronger.

Jesus is already working somewhere. Are you strong enough in your faith to get where’s He’s working and join Him?

On the third day he rose again.

He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

There are four key concepts in this section of the Apostles’ Creed: bodily resurrection, bodily ascension, present rule, and coming judgment.

The resurrection of Jesus is the linchpin of our faith – an illustration used by Derek Vreeland (primal credo). “A linchpin is a small locking metal pin that is inserted crosswise through a metal shaft to hold things together. …Without the resurrection in our creed, our faith dwindles into nothing more than a failed human experiment with morality and religion.” (p. 68) (Image credit) J.I. Packer (Affirming the Apostles’ Creed), Ben Myers (The Apostles’ Creed) and Michael Bird (What Christians ought to Believe) agree with Vreeland, although expressing it somewhat differently. Without the resurrection Christian faith is an empty religion.

1 Corinthians 15:12-35 is a key passage here. J.I. Packer starts by quoting Paul “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” (v. 17) In a similar vein Michael Bird points out that “the resurrection is the vehicle of our salvation.” (p. 156) While the cross is important, it is the resurrection that gives victory over death and sin. In addition to 1 Cor. 15:17 Bird points to Romans 4:25 “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” And 1 Peter 1:3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

All of this is to say that God’s justice, forgiveness, new birth, and life are given to us in the crucified and risen Jesus. A dead Jesus can be a teacher or a martyr, but he cannot be our Savior. We apprehend life only as it is given to us in the life of the risen Jesus. … Resurrection, then, is the power of God for salvation, a salvation that forgives and renews his people. (pp. 156-157)

Packer goes on to point out that our hope for resurrection is contingent on the resurrection of Jesus. “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:19) This is the breaking in of God’s new creation. The resurrection “brings [the believer] into the reality of resurrection life now.” (p. 92) It shapes our approach to life, in fellowship with Christians, standing firm in the faith, acting in accord with the coming kingdom of God. Romans 6 connects salvation through the resurrection to Christian obedience – we are no longer slaves to sin but slaves to righteousness. Bird concludes: “In the resurrection of Jesus, death works backward, and God’s kingdom moves forward, propelling us with it toward the new heaven and new earth that lie ever before us.” (p. 159)

The resurrection is not the end of the story – if this is the linchpin …

The bodily ascension of Jesus is anchor of our faith. Mike Bird points us to Hebrews 6:19-20 “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.” Ben Myers focuses specifically on the bodily nature of the resurrection. The early church, beset by Gnostic heresies denigrating the flesh and spiritualizing both the resurrection and the ascension as a separation of the true Christ from the inferior material body, focused specifically on the resurrection and ascension of Jesus in the flesh. (Image credit)

It was against such teaching that the early Christians proclaimed a gospel of Christ’s bodily incarnation, bodily suffering, bodily death, bodily resurrection, and bodily ascension. The faith of the ancient church was not about spiritual escape but about the redemption and transfiguration of human life in its fullness, including the life of the body. As Irenaeus said it in the second century, the Son of God “did not reject human nature or exalt himself above it;” but united himself with our nature in order to unite us to God. (p. 88)

Michael Bird also elaborates on the bodily resurrection of Jesus – as a human being:

[T]he ascension demonstrates that God has placed a human being at the helm of the universe. It is vital that we remember that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he did not cease to be human and morph into some disembodied state like a humanoid ghost. Jesus ascended as a human being and remains in this glorified human state for the rest of eternity. The significance of this is that God has placed a human person as the head of the universe. This is precisely what God had intended all along. (p. 164)

The ascensions places Jesus at the right hand of the Father which leads to …

Present rule. Ben Myers also points out that the ascension doesn’t lead to Jesus’ absence but to his more complete presence in creation. “His ascent “to the right hand of the Father” is his public enthronement over all worldly power.” (p. 88) Both Myers and Bird point to the importance of Psalm 110 in our understanding of the ascent to the right hand of the father.

The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

The whole psalm is relevant. The right hand of the Father is a place of sovereign rule, not a place of passive waiting.

Bird runs through three aspects of this rule:

First, Jesus is exalted to God’s right hand and is invested with divine authority. Jesus had been formally exalted, that is, installed as God the Father’s vice-regent and the one in whom and through whom divine sovereignty is expressed. (p. 166)

Second, believers embryonically share in the reign of Christ by virtue of their union with Christ. (p. 167)

Myer turns to early church writings, specifically Irenaeus to emphasis the importance of this union: “When Jesus ascends to the Father, he takes our humanity with him. To quote Irenaeus again, because Jesus has ascended we also “ascend through the Spirit to the Son, and through the Son to the Father.” In Jesus, our nature has taken up residence in the presence of God.” (p. 89)

Third, Jesus remains our high priest even from his heavenly throne. The priestly office of Christ is expressed in his mediation between God and humanity. (p. 167-168)

On this last point Bird refers us again to the book of Hebrews: “A recurring theme in Hebrews is that Jesus has entered the heavenly sanctuary ahead of us as our forerunner, and we have assurance that we too will be accepted there (Heb 6:20; 10:19-22).” (p. 168)

Packer elaborates on the role of Jesus as mediator who intercedes for us. “‘Interceding’ denotes not a suppliant making an appeal to charity, but the intervening of one who has sovereign right and power to make requests and take action in another’s interest.” (p. 101)

From present rule, the creed looks forward…

Future judgment. The section of the creed focused on Christ concludes with Jesus returning to judge both the living and the dead. The second coming is approached with trepidation by many these days. Certainly there has been a great deal of misunderstanding and faulty popularization over the last fifty years or more. The coming judgment, however, is a key affirmation of the creed and a fundamental part of Christian faith. Packer emphasizes the kind of judgment we are used to thinking about where are judged according to the Lamb’s book of life.  “[T]he Creed looks to the day when he will come publicly to wind up history and judge all men-Christians as Christians, accepted already, whom a “blood-bought free reward” … rebels as rebels, to be rejected by the Master whom they rejected first.” (p. 106) (Image credit)

This judgment is not simply a separation of the faithful from the unbelievers. It is also a purifying judgment of those who are Christ-followers (see 1 Cor. 3:12-15). Myers summarizes:

Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. That will be the best thing that ever happens to us. On that day the weeds in each of us will be separated from the wheat. It will hurt- no doubt it will hurt-when our self-deceptions are burned away. But the pain of truth heals; it does not destroy. On our judgment day we will be able for the first time to see the truth of our lives, when we see ourselves as loved. (p. 93-94)

Michael Bird, on the other hand, emphasizes the return of Jesus as the establishment of the kingdom of God. The world will finally be set right, creation redeemed.

All three of these are important aspects of the Creed and of Christian faith.

Those who call on the name of the Lord are saved through faith.

Believers are judged for their actions and choices.

Creation is renewed and redeemed.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

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