Faith Fights: Jesus

Hello, everybody,
and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as we continue on with
this new series that we began called “Faith Fights,” and today we’re jumping into the
substance of that as we move beyond introduction into a little bit of a grounding into why
Christians fight.
We’re going to now start sort of exemplifying some of the themes that we kicked off last
week, and we’re going to look with what has got to be,
by really any measure,
I think a historical measure, theological measure.
When you really look at the early church,
the first knockdown drag-out fights that dominated
the church were certainly questions about Jesus Christ,
about who He was,
and even more than that.
And so that’s where we turn our substance of conversation today.
Yeah, so during this series we will try to go chronological,
and Michael, that’s not easy because it’s not as if there’s a moment where Christians stop fighting about some
of the things we have fought about before.
These various disagreements pop up throughout the church’s history,
but we will try to examine
them when possible with a historic view of the kind of church calendar in mind.
And this one, I think, takes us back probably to the very beginning.
You know, there’s some evidence in the New Testament of disagreements.
Paul in his letters is clearly arguing with people over some things like circumcision
or whether you can eat food that was sacrificed to idols.
But that seems to be more family squabbles over practice,
and while there is certainly
theology involved in those conversations,
I don’t think most of us would characterize
those as epitomizing a theological argument.
Now, that changes very much in the late 200s,
early 300s as the church is kind of moving
out of that period of oppression,
is coming above ground,
especially in the 300s after
Christianity is made legal by Constantine.
The church comes up and they begin to have these wider and broader conversations,
and as they do,
they run into some log jams fairly quickly,
and the earliest and the most significant
of those conflicts all have to do with Jesus.
So I think maybe a helpful metaphor to understand some of the early church’s movement might
be around the idea of boundaries,
namely, where do you set the boundaries?
And I think some of the earliest scriptural things that you’re referencing, Clint,
I think a lot of these are practice ethics kinds of things,
and the question at play in the
New Testament is largely,
what do we do with Gentiles?
What do we do with people who have had historically different ethical codes?
What do they need to practice within the Christian faith?
What is the boundary of the faith as it relates to who can even be a Christian?
And the New Testament voice is that it is a larger circle than what was generally conceived
of.
What I think you begin to discover,
once that boundary is firmly set after a couple hundred
years, in other words, there isn’t any question in Constantine’s era,
can Gentiles be Christians?
Constantine is a Gentile who makes this sort of national proclamation,
so that now has
been decided.
That question of the boundary is now behind the Christian church.
What now lives ahead of the church is to try to define what now is the boundary of the
faith.
What is the marker of one who has come into the faith?
Not necessarily sort of that ethnic boundary that once existed in the early church, that question.
Now it’s,
what is the propositional belief?
What is the nature of what it is to be substantially Christian?
What defines you as being in the circle and out of the circle?
And as the church is making those sort of distinctions,
the thing that the church is
going to and has to run up against is the person of Jesus Christ.
He’s the center of all four gospels.
That’s clear in the New Testament witness.
Clearly Paul in the New Testament letters is functioning with a very strong,
what we would call Christological or Christ-centered understanding of the world.
And so as the church is trying to take these scriptures,
trying to draft boundaries for
what it means to be Christian in this new world,
they come to the substance of that question.
Who is this person Jesus Christ?
And they start to tease out some of the finer points of what that means because as the church
comes above ground, Clint, as persecution lifts and the church now looks around and
we mentioned this in our previous conversation,
they begin to see, oh my goodness,
we’ve had different understandings that in some cases substantially and other cases not substantially,
but we have had different flavors,
thoughts,
even texts.
And as they begin to process that together,
they realize there needs to be a sustained
conversation about what is the universal witness as to who Christ was because that was significant.
I wonder, Michael, if it’s fair to say that the Jesus problem is a kind of generational
issue and in some ways it is a community identity issue.
And what I’m thinking of is in the earliest origins of the faith,
the argument was, was Jesus the Messiah or not?
And the early Christians,
Paul in particular and others,
took it as their mission to prove
to a largely Jewish audience that Jesus was in fact the Messiah.
But the concept of Messiah was well understood.
When people heard that word,
it meant something.
And as the church becomes increasingly Gentile,
they now have to face these questions about
when we say Jesus,
when we say Savior,
what do we mean?
What is the nature of this person we are now talking about as Lord?
What do we believe about him in a way that I think that earliest genesis of the Christian
church maybe didn’t have,
maybe they had more of a consensus initially.
And as we get down the road and people begin to ask questions and say,
well, what about this aspect of Jesus?
Is Jesus this or this?
It creates a kind of second and third generation of faith problem that then has to be addressed
for the church to find some unity and some cohesion.
And there’s some fascinating history there really circling around that idea.
Yeah, and if you are a student of history,
the church actually has many periods where
they sort of take up not the substantial questions of who Jesus was,
but there’s people like
Aquinas who in the Middle Ages comes to Jesus.
And there’s this unbelievably complicated history of the church trying to reason out
who Jesus was and what its impact is and the extent of it.
Some of the most thoughtful,
intelligent people of all time have taken up that task.
But early in the period that we’re talking about, Clint,
I’ve heard people complain.
I’ve been in classes with people and we’ve been talking about some of these things and
people have complained about how complicated the conversation of Jesus is.
This idea of him having two natures and what’s the substance and why is that significant
when you look at the creeds?
And then you turn to the Trinity and people sort of glaze over right away and they say, “My goodness,
what? Could have we made this any more complicated?”
And I think a good starting point when you talk about Jesus is that the church went down
this road of increasing complexity and nuance,
not because they were masochistic and they
liked beating their heads against the wall,
but because when they encountered the Jesus of Scripture,
the Jesus that we have,
they saw in those words things that when taken
seriously led them to grapple with the faith and things that I think we’ve now maybe taken
for granted, Clint, like we’re right now in the Advent season,
we’re coming close to the celebration of Christmas,
and we take for granted this idea that an angel appears to
Mary and she in faith and courage says,
“Let it be with me,” and then this idea that the
Son of God is born to a virgin.
Well, that is part of our tradition,
it’s part of our narrative,
and we have a sense
in which we sort of just jump into the jet stream of it.
But I would encourage you for a moment,
put yourself in the shoes of the earliest Christians
who receive that text,
who read it for the first time and say,
“Well, how do I make sense of this?”
So is Jesus substantially or fully human,
or is Jesus not human?
Is Jesus God?
And somehow there’s like a flesh wrapper on him,
and maybe that seems like a strange question,
but that’s an important question if you’re going to take the words of Scripture and the substance
of faith seriously.
If you’re going to take it serious that God did this thing in real life,
that Jesus really lived this out,
then when you turn a rational and thoughtful eye upon this,
it’s going to bring
with it these very substantial and nuanced questions,
and the earliest generation of
these churches’ theologians or those who study God, think about God,
they’re grappling with those questions.
And I think in some ways,
Michael, that’s the easiest way to access the conversation
and maybe the place to start is to examine that very claim.
The idea of Jesus being born is problematic theologically because it brings with it the second generation question,
“Well,
what do we mean when we say Jesus is human?”
Is Jesus only human?
And early on, there is a thought that Jesus is a human who God then adopts.
God sends his spirit into and kind of claims him,
and the church wrestles with that and
says, “No, that’s not what we want to say about Jesus.
We want to say that Jesus is God.”
And yet others said,
“Wait, you just said he was human.
So are you now saying Jesus is God but only looks like a human?”
And there was a camp of the church that believed that,
that Jesus was.
And this is not unheard of in the Roman and Greek world.
There were stories about God putting on disguises and coming down and even having children with mortals.
And you had these God-like figures,
say Hercules,
who has a human mother and a God father.
And so the Christians had to sort out,
“No, that’s not what we’re saying.”
There was this line of Christians that thought Jesus only looked like a person,
but couldn’t have been a real person because flesh is tainted and flesh is sinful,
and God couldn’t have occupied that.
And the church, over time, begins to argue, “No, we want to say in a way that no one has
ever said about anything else that Jesus is both of those things.
Jesus is completely and fully human with everything that goes with that.
And yet, He is also completely divine.
He is the embodiment of God as well,
and both of those things exist in this one man.
And the church really breaks new ground in proclaiming that.
I think it’s a really helpful way to frame that,
Clint, because we often miss how creative,
and I don’t mean creative as in making stuff up.
I mean, creative as in this has never been done before,
this kind of connection.
And it only happens because of the church’s wrestling with these two realities.
Another way to look at it is,
how do you reconcile the creator becoming part of the creation?
What do you make of that?
In the ancient world,
the creator of things tended to be substantially,
meaning the substance of who they were was different than the stuff that was created.
So that the God was spiritual and the physical was human.
And the sort of prevailing idea in that time,
and by the way,
it still exists in our own time,
is that the physical reality is therefore bad.
It is broken.
I mean, we look around and we see sin.
We see bodies that are sick.
We see all of the kind of dirtiness of human life.
And it’s natural, therefore, as a human to say,
well, the one who created all of this,
who exists out of space and time,
the one who made this stuff,
that person is never dirty.
That person’s never sick.
The creator is not subject to the captiveness,
the finiteness of the creation.
But here’s the thing.
If you read the gospel accounts,
which by the way are early in the church’s life,
we’re not talking a couple hundred years.
We’re talking within decades of Jesus’s life.
The early church has in our scriptures this conviction
that Jesus Christ is the son of God,
born to a Virgin Mary.
This stuff wasn’t implanted.
This stuff was there from the beginning.
And so as the church gets older and begins to wrestle with,
no, no, no, we can’t fall back on these old sort of distinctions
between the spiritual and the natural.
We have in our scriptures this strange combination of both.
And what they come up with,
Clint, I think you say so well,
is a new understanding.
It is an absolutely new way of conceiving and speaking of God’s action in the world.
That the creator would take on the created.
That the creator would be substantially in Jesus Christ.
That God is fully there.
The one who made everything is Jesus.
And yet Jesus is substantially also fully the human creature.
So that Jesus experienced a full human life.
And that is both mind bending in its complexity,
but it is also something new that really had not been conceived of before.
And I’ve got to say,
if you are a close reader of history,
there’s a long, I mean, we’re skipping over tons of people,
tons of debates, tons of tracks and treatises.
I mean,
we could not overemphasize the amount of argument,
of disagreement,
of flat out just anger levy to other people in the church,
as this is all getting sort of processed.
But ultimately, it’s this combination of these two things being combined
that begins to win the essential adoption of the church.
Yes, well said, Michael.
And I think it’s fair to say,
and push back if you disagree,
early on there are some arguments on that physical side of the line.
In other words, Jesus’ humanity.
There are those who say that Jesus isn’t human.
But relatively quickly,
the church by and large accepts the premise that Jesus is human.
That Jesus is flesh and blood.
That He did die.
That He ate meals.
That He lived a human life.
That He had moments of hunger.
The Gospels even record tears at one point,
and some of those kind of human elements.
And so, theologically, it seems to me that in the next real wave of the conversation,
the argument largely lands on the side of the fence of Jesus’
nature, His divine nature.
And specifically,
what do we mean when we say that Jesus is divine?
Do we in fact mean that Jesus is God,
or is like God in some ways?
And I think as we move into,
say, the late 200s, early 300s,
this is where the bulk of the argument,
really, the faith fight really exists.
This idea that,
can we say that Jesus and God are equals?
And part of that is,
do we say that Jesus is created?
Do we say that Jesus is pre-existent?
In other words, has Jesus always been,
or was there a time when Jesus wasn’t?
These are then the questions that live in that part of the argument.
And they really come to the surface in the early 300s.
There’s a man named Arius who is teaching that Jesus and God don’t have the same nature,
that Jesus has a divine nature,
but it’s not God’s nature.
Jesus is something spiritually different than God.
And Arius puts together a fairly significant following,
and his idea called Arianism
begins to spread, and there are others who push back against that fairly strongly.
And that comes to a head in the early 300s,
specifically 315 to say 325 in there somewhere.
And we have this showdown at a place called Nicaea,
where Constantine has told the Christians,
“You guys go and get this sorted out.
We can’t have these differences of opinion.
We’ve got to have this thing sorted.”
And Arianism loses the argument, really.
There are those who,
through Scripture and through voting and through persuasion,
push that into history.
And really, from then on,
we see the church affirm this idea that Jesus and God are co-equal,
that they are of the same substance,
and not to bore you with theological history,
but substance becomes a supremely important word in that argument.
Right.
And I do think there’s some textualizing that helps here,
because we do not,
in our general practice of the church,
wrestle with these kinds of questions,
these very fundamental questions about who Jesus was,
because of the work that’s been done and given to us.
And we’re going to talk later in these faith fights about the kinds of debates and fights
that we have tended to have in our own lifespans as the church.
What I think needs to be understood is that this is a very fundamental question for us to understand
what it means to be Christian,
because who Jesus is and the exact nature of his substance
is directly related to how we understand what God has done in salvation and what that means for us.
And let me give you a really sort of concrete example of what that means.
The Christian doctrine of resurrection is completely based upon our understanding
of what happened to Jesus,
the resurrected.
And so as we seek to affirm our faith as Christians in the resurrection from the dead,
that God will restore life to those even after death by his own power,
we see in Jesus this question,
if Jesus was substantially different than God,
then was Jesus fully human?
And did God do to Jesus something that God was just simply doing differently?
Can we say that Jesus bore the sins of the world if he wasn’t God?
Is it capable for a human to be the sort of sacrificial lamb?
And the early church wrestled with these and put them all against each other and said no,
there’s really no way that atonement or reconciliation to God could happen by mere human action.
Jesus had to have been more than human.
But on the other hand,
there’s really no way that we can see that Jesus could have been resurrected
except for miraculous act of a God outside of the human existence,
because we know from our human alone vantage,
resurrection is an impossibility.
So there has to be a combination of both.
And as the church affirmed this idea that Jesus is substantially the same as God,
we begin to see that Jesus was both the one proclaiming the kingdom of God,
that Messiah figure that we know the Jewish community was looking for,
who was a human figure, right?
But we also begin to see that Jesus who forgave sins
was not doing that from some human sort of counterfeit place.
He was doing that as the one who can forgive sins,
the actual God who will atone for our sins himself.
So I realized, Clint, there’s a sense in which we’ve just jumped into the deep end of the pool.
But the point I want to draw out of this is,
amidst all of this sort of deep,
heady theological thinking, there’s real practical results.
Like what do we mean by resurrection?
Well,
that conversation, which is a real substance of our faith,
only makes sense if we can turn the microscope and see how clearly important this conversation
of the substance of Jesus is,
because that conversation has a direct correlation to this next.
And these other, more concrete ones.
Yeah, and we are condensing lots of stuff that is happening simultaneously.
It’s not exactly step by step,
but in order to try and simplify it,
we’re presenting it that way.
So you have this moment where the early church is arguing these questions.
Is Jesus God or is Jesus man?
And the consensus of the people of faith is, yes,
both.
Both of those are true.
And as people argued from one perspective or another,
this is the sort of doctrine or belief
system that becomes acceptable and becomes standardized in our faith.
And that happens fairly early in the church’s life,
and so we’ve lived with it for a long time.
But in conjunction with that,
you can see how that easily leads to the next question.
Now, it’s not next chronologically because it’s being asked at the same time,
but the next logical place to dig in is,
well, what about the Holy Spirit then?
Are we talking about the Holy Spirit as something that is different than God,
different than Jesus,
or not?
And where does the Spirit come from?
If it comes from God,
does it then by definition also come from Jesus if Jesus is God?
And so I don’t think we have to dig very deep because the Trinity is a longstanding and very
confusing doctrine of the Christian faith,
but this is also being asked,
and it’s of a similar
kind of conversation that the early church,
and specifically that Council of Nicaea in about 325,
gives some flesh to the idea of what we know as Trinity.
And from that moment,
or at least officially now,
the church begins to voice,
and continues to voice
really, this now standardized idea that when we speak of God,
we speak of a three-person deity,
a father,
son,
and spirit, who share natures with one another but are experienced in different ways,
and in some sense have different functions within the relationship with the human family and the church.
And, Michael, I think though the Trinity is very conceptually hard to understand,
maybe it’s easier to see how it’s related to conversations about the nature of Jesus and the
divinity or the divine nature of Jesus.
Right.
I think a very accessible way to understand how the early church comes to
wrestle with this, Clint, is that they must,
we must remember that they inherited the monotheism,
the one-God belief,
of the Jewish people.
That is a thing that Jesus himself speaks about.
And so that’s a thing that the early Christians bring with them.
There is one God.
But then let me ask you,
what do you make of the Lord’s Prayer when Jesus says,
“Our Father”?
What do you do when
Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane and he’s praying to God,
wrestling with let it be a different way?
How could you think of Jesus,
who we’ve just affirmed,
is substantially the same as God?
How can he be substantially the same as God and yet there only be one God?
Aren’t we talking about
two gods at this point?
How do we move beyond monotheism into a kind of bi-theism, two theisms?
And the early church is resisting that and saying,
“No, no, no, no.
Yeah, listen.
We know that when we say he’s both fully God and fully human,
we know that that’s beyond conception.
That doesn’t work out mathematically.
But we also want to say there’s this Holy Spirit who we see
poured out in the church in Acts and Jesus himself.
That wasn’t written into the Gospels.
It has been there and they wrestle with that and say, “No,
when you look at it,
there is more about these
relationships than what we originally conceived of.” And once again,
the Trinity I think is another,
and maybe in Christian theology,
the supreme example of God revealing something that was
completely new to human conception.
What came in the doctrine of the Trinity was this growing
awareness that there has always been more there than what we realized.
And as people of faith,
we continue to see more and more and more clearly this thing that has always been true.
In fact,
some of the earliest Christians and some of the brightest minds of the Christian church went back
upon this growing awareness of the Trinity to what we call the Old Testament.
And they read the Old Testament in these unbelievably fruitful ways,
pointing out how from the Christian vantage,
the Trinity is written all over these texts.
And I think what’s amazing is we begin to
see that the church recognizes that the breadth of God’s revelation in Christ is more than what
we could have possibly realized.
In other words, it wasn’t just confusing to the disciples,
which we have written throughout all the Gospels,
is clearly so beyond the full ability for humans to
contemplate that we’re continuing to sort of find more and more treasures in the midst of this revelation.
And I recognize that lots of people hear Trinity and that’s sort of when they like
tune out of the conversation.
I think practically,
Clint, the Trinity is a natural outgrowth of this
question of who is Jesus and how is Jesus related to who God is.
And as the church wrestles to really
sort this out, what we find happening is a common foundation is being made.
If you are going to live within the Christian circle,
these are fundamental propositions that you must wrestle
with and there comes a point you must assent to.
And if you do not,
then you’re living outside the
scope of what the church believe has been revealed in Jesus Christ.
Yeah, and that rarely happens as
a moment.
It happens as something over time that the church lives into.
And so the culture of early
Christianity was comfortable with the idea of three gods.
The culture of early Christianity was
comfortable with the idea of one god sort of changing personalities and playing three different roles.
What becomes the new teaching of Christianity and really unwalked ground is
this idea that somehow there is one god yet three manifestations of the same substance,
the same person, the same being who comes to us or is known to us in three distinct roles, three distinct persons.
And this is the very challenging and confusing belief that over time wins the day.
And one of the markers I think that we have and we’re fortunate to live on the back end of so many
of these kind of controversies.
But one of the ways we have access to them is to go back and
look at our family stories.
And specifically in the Reformed Church,
the Presbyterian Church, we value documents known as creeds,
which are essentially belief statements.
And one of the
things that is almost universally true is that when you look at a creed,
you are seeing a snapshot
of some of what was happening while it was written.
So for instance, you take the Apostle’s Creed,
which says, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” right?
This is about all it says about God.
And you can jump to the conclusion fairly quickly.
They’re not arguing about God.
They’re not pinning down God doctrines.
But then you look at the substantial,
the middle of that creed
is almost all definitions of Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived, who this, who this, who this.
And you think, “Oh,
this is clearly a statement that is providing clarity
to what the church should believe about Jesus Christ.” And then there’s not a whole lot of
Holy Spirit.
In fact,
the Holy Spirit is simply mentioned,
but not really fleshed out.
When you get to the Nicene Creed,
some 150 or so years later,
you have, again,
not a lot about God.
You have language about Jesus specifically of one substance with the Father,
very specific language about the argument of the day.
And then you have a significant conversation about Holy Spirit,
where what is the Holy Spirit?
What does the Holy Spirit do?
And where does the Holy Spirit come from,
from both Father and Son?
And you can look at those creeds and get a sense of what they address.
In other words, in writing these things down,
what were they trying to quiet or quell in the bigger
picture?
And I think that gives us a fascinating lens as we look back on the statements of our
fathers and mothers of how they came to resolution and the ideas that ultimately in the pursuit of
truth were discerned and ended up being accepted as doctrinal canon in the church.
Yeah, and I need to be careful here,
so I just want to put in a footnote here.
You’re always on dangerous ground when you’re trying to extrapolate from the creeds.
You’re trying to make some statements about implications of the creeds,
because the implications are far beyond
what we’re going to have in any term and any length of a conversation.
But let’s put it this
way, especially for those of you who say, “Man,
I’ve been here now for almost 33 minutes,
and a lot of this stuff is a lot deeper than what I was looking for in terms of the faith fights.
This is not my experience of faith fights at all.” And I think I might want to point out
that from our vantage of history,
when we receive these creeds,
it feels to us like they’ve been
wrapped up and put a bow on them,
that it’s been handed to us.
We open it, we’re grateful for it,
and we say, “Glad the church did that.
Why are we talking about how they got to it?” And I think
if that’s our vantage,
we maybe should spend a little bit of time recognizing that it is these
creeds that provide for us the foundational understanding of how we operate in the world.
Because to be Christian post these creeds means that we cannot at any time in the future
either completely disavow the physical world in which we live,
nor can we disavow the spiritual
world that God has called us to occupy.
And that was an option before the creeds.
In other words,
you could say, “You know what?
Jesus was really not substantially human.
Jesus was just God.
And so therefore, when God saves us all,
God’s going to just throw away our bodies.
God’s going to burn up the world.
God’s going to get rid of all of this creation stuff,
which is dirty and messy.
And God’s just going to make everything pure,
this sort of platonic bliss.
And salvation in that frame could be the completely destruction of everything that we know God to have made and
called good in the book of Genesis.
And that is no longer an option post the creeds.
We must be people who grapple with the divine nature of Christ in our own lives.
In other words, that we have a spirit that God lives in us by the power of,
now we’re talking Trinitarian language, the Holy Spirit.
And yet also,
God made us,
God created our bodies,
that God intends for us to
do good to the creation that surrounds us.
So this has an impact on our understanding,
and the Reformed faith has carried out this ethical sort of understanding from these basic
doctrines in lots of different ways.
But that gives us responsibility to be stewards of creation,
stewards of our body.
Understanding that our physical nature does have impact in God’s
salvific plan for the world,
even if that plan is also a spiritual one.
We see how the substance of
these, what may be hard to grapple with theological ideas,
has actual implications for who we
understand ourselves to be and what God plans to do with us.
That’s what we call this idea of
salvation, that God has a plan.
And we can’t understand that plan if we don’t understand who
Jesus was and who God is,
because these two things,
because Jesus came into our reality fully God and fully human,
these two things are both connected.
And at some point your mind explodes because
we’re combining things that were unthinkably never to be combined,
and yet they have been
in this mysterious act of God.
And that does, my point here,
is that does have a concrete
implication for how we understand ourselves to be,
who we understand ourselves to be,
and what God plans and desires to do with us.
One of the struggles,
and certainly a person could be forgiven for thinking that some of this is
dry and boring and maybe not that important now,
you know,
almost two millennia later.
But one of the implications for us,
and I think one of the difficulties for us, is
that we’re accustomed to having these fences within which Christianity operates.
Those men, and to lesser extent women,
who were involved in discerning and putting together these ideas and
finding these truths in Scripture and establishing them for the church,
they set parameters that the rest of us have lived within for the entire rest of the church’s history.
And our experience of church fights maybe is very different than that.
You know,
we have a friend who’s Christian who says Christians shouldn’t dance,
or they shouldn’t read these books, or they should do this,
and we say, well, that’s not how I do it,
and we agree to disagree.
But what we are talking about,
I think, as we go back into these more
substantial arguments, is setting direction for the rest of the Christian family and for the rest,
in some ways, of Christian history.
I remember being in seminary with a friend of mine who,
in the conversation one day, simply stated, “Well,
I don’t believe in the Trinity.”
And I said, “Well,
you can’t.” I mean,
right, we now live in a place where it is assumed,
if one calls them self-Christian,
they embrace these ideas that at the time were not fenced.
They didn’t exist.
Or if they existed,
they existed as one option among several.
And it was through this sort of iron sharpens iron and even conflictual engagement at times
that those roads get set for us.
And we now, many of the fights that we’ve had since then,
happen within the road,
within the path that those men and women created for us.
And I think it makes it hard for us to understand, Michael,
how much is at stake and how much of our
faith rests on the work that they did before us,
because we often experience Christian disagreements
over peripheral things.
But these are at the very core of our identity.
Now, in weeks to come,
we’re going to talk about arguments that I think will be more entertaining and more accessible.
But I don’t think you could make the case that there are any more important than those that we
start the story with that have to do fundamentally with who we’re talking about when we talk about
Jesus Christ and what is the nature and relationship of Jesus Christ in relationship with God.
Check me on this,
Clint, but I want to make the case that as we move into the future conversations in this series,
some of them are going to become very surface level conversations.
And in some cases, I don’t necessarily mean that those are less important,
but they’re certainly not going
to be related directly to the substance of Jesus Christ,
which is the heart of the faith.
The case I do want to make,
though, is that there is a correct ordering in this conversation.
In other words, I think we would be wrong to begin with some of those questions of Christian practice
that the church has fought about for centuries,
millennia, because at their root,
if you dig deep
enough, if you live in them long enough,
if you think about them with enough rigor,
you will eventually find yourself back into these conversations.
And ultimately, what you’re going to discover is that one side of an argument of a fight,
if they’re being very thoughtful,
are going to be emphasizing one aspect of these original conversations.
They’re going to have to
live within those guardrails that you talked about if they’re going to live in what we call the orthodox faith.
But there’s often cases where someone’s going to emphasize one part of the creed
over another.
They’re going to say,
we need to pay attention to this.
Not that this isn’t important
or isn’t true, but we think we should pay attention here.
And once you begin to recognize
how this particular issue is connected to our understanding of who Jesus Christ is,
it enables you to begin to have far more reasonable,
I think, conversations about,
well, should we emphasize that to that extent?
Should we not also consult the creed as it speaks
to this aspect of who Jesus was?
And as we begin to get a sense for this,
I think it affects not
just intellectual knowledge, which is, I think, the unfortunate sort of byproduct of a lot of
conversations about Jesus’s humanity and divinity about the Trinity.
We tend to get very cerebral, especially as Presbyterians.
I think that these doctrines should also work within us,
spirits of humility and faith.
I don’t think any encounter with these doctrines that does not lead to us
on some level being astonished and grateful for who God is and the extreme magnitude of God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ.
If we aren’t on some level taken aback by it,
we haven’t encountered these doctrines rightfully.
And that spirit is,
I think, the spirit that does need to transfer
into these other conversations that we’ll have.
In other words,
I think we suffer so often because
of our human simpleness from this belief that we are right,
that we should lord our rightness
over others.
You cannot get to the Trinity and take some high ground of rightness in which you
cannot be corrected from advantage because there is not a human understanding of the Trinity that
is perfect.
It does not exist.
We have to approach it as a matter of faith with humility,
a recognition of that God is larger than ourselves,
and we should bring that same recognition into these other
conversations, which I think we’re going to find difficult to do.
If there is a significant
difference, Michael, in this conversation and what I envision down the road,
it may be that as we
continue our series, we will find ourselves focusing fairly regularly on what Christians
can, should,
shouldn’t do.
A lot of the disagreements that we’ll look at have to do with those questions.
Can a Christian do this?
Should a Christian do that?
Should a Christian not do that?
And differences of opinion that find their way into those questions.
It seems to me
that this topic is different in the sense that this is about who we are.
This is about what is
the fundamental core of our faith.
And the reason I think you have to start there and the importance
of starting there is once those parameters are drawn,
once we understand historically that when
I call myself Christian,
I am affirming the mystery of a Trinitarian God and the beauty and
impossibly challenging belief that Jesus Christ,
his Son,
our Savior, was both God and man in a way
that changed human future,
human possibility,
and continues to change human hearts.
I now have some room to undertake those other conversations.
When I argue with somebody about
whether Christians should do yoga or listen to rock music,
I am not saying whether or not they
belong inside the faith.
And that’s the thing I think we so often confuse,
is that this is a
fundamental identity argument about who is Christian and who is not.
So many of these other
things that we’ll look at are not,
and yet sometimes they’re treated as if they are.
And as we go forward,
I think it’s helpful to remember that once the family parameters are
established, we’re all in the family,
whether we agree or not.
You know, and maybe one way to look at that,
Clint, is to bring to those conversations whatever
they’re going to be,
whether we’re having the conversation or whether you’re having that
conversation, wherever you are.
I do think that we should always ask the question,
where is Jesus Christ in this?
Because that’s always the starting point for a Christian.
You know,
I’ve been sort of
made fun of in confirmation and youth group for talking about Jesus a lot,
and I count that as a
mark of doing my job well.
Because if I’m ever not returning back to who Jesus Christ is,
I am now not living within the boundaries that the church has given us.
Jesus is a really big deal,
and we cannot overemphasize how big of a deal he is.
And if we take him seriously,
he’s going to take us
in all of these unbelievably complex and faith-inducing ways.
We’ve talked about them already today.
But I do think,
Clint, that when we come to these more ethical conversations,
then next week we’re talking about the Bible,
which isn’t really ethical.
I mean, there’s some substance in
that as well.
How does the Bible point us to Christ?
I just think it’s worth noting that we
can never move beyond the question,
who is Jesus?
And if you ever find yourself having a faith
argument with someone in which Jesus is not at the center,
I would advise you to take a step back and
to reevaluate, because that’s a good indication that you may have strayed from the substance.
Yeah, absolutely.
And when Jesus is at the center,
it changes the nature of our disagreements
with others and the substance of how we treat one another when we may not agree on something.
So as we move forward,
if this is a conversation that’s left you swimming a little bit,
if this one felt like drinking from a fire hose,
we’re sorry about that.
That’s part of the nature of
the subject and the matter that we’re discussing.
I don’t think you’ll have that experience too
often again in the future.
So if this one left you swimming,
give us another shot.
Next week, we’re going to look at the Bible and the ways in which Christians…
And this one will be less
historical.
In other words,
this is an ongoing argument that has never been settled and
Christians continue to debate things regarding the Scripture daily in the world we live in,
and that has never not been the case.
So join with us again as we look at how Christians have had
differences of opinion over our Scriptures.
Thanks for being with us, everybody.
Take care.