It was only when something had\u00a0happened<\/em>, not Once Upon a Time, but to a specific group of people living in a real place during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat that creeds became necessary, because real memories, not dreams and legends, were involved. For this people was constantly being pressured by its neighbours and by its own sinful tendencies to\u00a0forget<\/em>\u00a0what had happened\u2013to remove Jesus to Cloud Cuckoo Land where anything and everything might be said of him, to make him more amenable to pagan tales and dreams. That is why John has to tell his flock:<\/p>\nBeloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. (1 Jn 4:1\u20133)<\/p>\n
Jesus Christ\u2013God\u2013has come in the flesh.\u00a0 More than this, he has been raised in the flesh too:\u00a0 breaking bread, eating fish, being touched after his Resurrection.\u00a0 And still more than this he has pressed into the minds, hearts, mouths, and hands of his disciples a Eucharist of that crucified, raised, and glorified flesh with the word, \u201cDo this in memory of me\u201d (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24-25).\u00a0 He has refused to stay in the realm of myth and has left footprints and drunk water from a well in Nazareth that can be located with a GPS.\u00a0 He is not merely the comfortably abstract \u201cthat which was from the beginning\u201d.<\/p>\n
He is, far more alarmingly, that \u201cwhich we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands\u201d (1 John 1:1).\u00a0 And so, the Church\u2019s history necessarily became one long and careful act of remembering, not imagining\u2014designed to make sure that their past was not lost. Since what had happened was so strange\u2014and so fraught with the possibility of being misunderstood in a thousand ways\u2014the early Christians therefore were immediately committed to creating Creeds: summaries of their experience that, while initially brief (\u201cJesus is Lord\u201d (Romans 10:9)), expanded in length over time to make sure that the broad contours of the basic story and its meaning were not lost.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
More here<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The next chapter in our discussion of the Creed is here: It was only when something had\u00a0happened, not Once Upon a Time, but to a specific group of people living in a real place during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat that creeds became necessary, because real memories, not dreams and legends, were involved. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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