Trinity and Gnosticism

Tonight, we’re going to continue to go through some early church stuff.
Next week will be a little bit of a transition as we kind of leave some of the doctrinal
stuff and we go to some of the practical stuff,
the quote-unquote heresies that are maybe
a little more interesting.
I’m going to warn you ahead of time,
tonight is going to be a little bit of all over the
map.
There is an effort being made tonight to try and bring several streams together.
Whether or not I do that,
you’ll have to decide.
It may for a while seem like it’s not going to work and it may not work,
but there are several things we’re going to talk about.
Most of them are going to at least touch on the concept of Trinity.
And so as we do that,
we need to unpack what it is we mean looking back when we use the
term Trinity.
That doctrine that comes together in the church really in some measure after that first evolution,
first generation of the church,
and is a doctrine that is not inherently scriptural,
in other words, there’s no place in the older New Testament that you can flip open and read description
of the Trinity.
Instead,
there are verses scattered throughout the Scripture that seem to speak to a concept
of God that later becomes this doctrine,
this idea of the threeness of God and the oneness
of God.
And so as you can imagine,
when you affirm that God is three persons but one God,
there is room to divert from the path on either side of that.
There are those who are going to argue against the threeness and there are those that are
going to argue against the oneness.
And the helpful thing in this is that lots of this battle takes place a little bit later
than some of the early heresies and so we have pretty good records.
Most apparently we have the creeds.
Many of the early creeds that you know and have used in the church are doctrinal statements
that at least in their background have to do with fleshing out the concept of the Trinity.
So,
this is perhaps one of the most difficult struggles theologically.
And there are a couple of different players and there are a couple of different ideas
that we need to talk about and again,
they sort of flow together but we are going to
handle them independently because I think that makes them simpler.
So,
championed by a man named Athanasius is this idea of,
and I’m sorry we’re going to do some Latin,
Homo usius.
Homo is one and usius is substance.
There’s another word that is important that I don’t know if I’m spelling right but you
don’t know do you?
Latin.
It’s spelled right of course that’s what I meant to say.
So Homo usius and Homo usius only the church could have knock down drag out battles over
the letter I but in this case the letter I is fairly important.
So Homo means of one, one substance.
Homoi means similar,
of similar substance.
And so the battle here is whether we speak of the Father,
the Son,
and the Spirit as
the same thing or similar things
and this becomes a significant battle.
The equality of Jesus to God is the major battle of the early church.
There is another group though they don’t get a lot of traction that advocates hetero usius,
in other words many substances,
different substances.
But this is the main conflict and this is expanded and to somewhat of a lesser extent
with the inclusion of the Holy Spirit but the primary battles are fought over Father, Son,
Spirit once the ground is paved to advocate that Jesus and God are of the same substance
they don’t fight a lot of those battles again in regard to the Holy Spirit.
So this man Apthenasius he champions the idea of Homo usius,
one substance
that as is the
Father so is the Son so is the Spirit that they are made of the same essence, the same stuff.
This is given, this is given,
no you know what,
let me,
yeah,
let me go through some
of the options and then we’ll talk about how we get some agreement.
So there are a couple of places that this one goes off.
One is called modalism and there’s a guy named Sibelius and this is also sometimes called monarchianism.
That’s the idea that there’s one God which has been the battle cry of Israel,
right?
There is one God.
The early Christians like the Jews before them confess this, believe this,
there is one God.
Well if there is one God in the very literal sense what is there not?
There’s not three,
there’s only one.
And so this man Sibelius argued that in Father,
Son and Spirit you have three eras.
You have one God acting in three roles.
They’re not different gods,
it’s the same God playing three parts.
God the Father in the Old Testament,
that God, the God of wrath and judgement and conquest,
God the Christ,
the Messiah, the forgiver,
the Savior in the New Testament
and then post New Testament God the Spirit.
But they’re not three,
they’re just one.
And this is called modalism,
the three modes in which God plays his role.
And this modalism catches on to an extent and is fairly prevalent in the first couple centuries.
And it preserves the idea of the oneness of God,
that’s its point in its favor and is fairly well known.
On the other hand there is a man named Nestorius and he has a belief that comes to be called Nestorianism
and says God and Christ are not of the same substance.
He’s on board with Jesus,
he’s on board with Jesus being fully divine,
fully human.
He’s not on board with Jesus and God being the same stuff.
Jesus is different stuff than is God,
the Father is different from the Son.
And in many branches of this Nestorianism,
the Son is subject to the Father.
In other words, a little less,
not entirely equal.
So these are a couple of these Trinitarian heresies.
There’s another one that comes later.
This one is called Montanism and it’s not very popular but it essentially holds that after Pentecost
the Father and Son fade into the background and the new era is a spirit era.
And so they really are in many ways the charismatics of their day.
They believed in aesthetic prophecy and in spirit filled preaching and experiential faith
and so they put a great deal of emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s activity,
minimizing the conversation of Father and Son.
So this is some of what’s going on out there in the early church.
And the battle that takes place happens in the early 300s.
In 313,
something fairly significant happens for the Christian church.
Does anybody know what that is?
It’s okay if you don’t.
In 313,
the Emperor Constantine declares Christianity will no longer be illegal.
Christianity will be an acceptable form of religion in the Roman Empire.
Twelve years later,
Constantine is so frustrated by the diversity and the messiness within Christianity
he calls 380 bishops together to a place called Nicaea and he says get it figured out.
We’ve got too much fighting,
we’ve got too much disruption,
too much diversity,
we can’t do it.
He knows this is a danger to the Empire so he calls them together, 325,
they go to Nicaea.
There are three major camps at Nicaea.
The first is a man named Arius and we talked a little bit about Arianism.
Arius argues that Jesus is less than God.
Jesus is subordinate to God.
They are not of the same substance.
Then there’s Alexander and Athanasius who argue one substance.
They essentially argue this modalism.
So you have they’re not the same and they’re so much the same that they’re not different.
And then in the middle there’s a man named Eusebius.
Eusebius kind of holds the middle ground and the majority of the bishops are with him.
So he writes down a creed and he takes it to Constantine who is running the meeting
and Constantine reads it and Constantine says I like it, seems pretty good.
And he puts it out in front of the bishops and most of the bishops say we could live with that.
But Alexander,
the modalist and two other bishops with him say absolutely not.
We will not compromise.
We will not change.
And Constantine says oh well okay,
how about this?
And he excommunicates them and all three of them lose their positions as bishops.
And then with three less people in the assembly Constantine says anybody else have an opinion?
And everybody says we love it.
It’s great.
It’s perfect.
In fact let’s do it.
And so they pass what is the early version of the Nicene Creed.
And if I could ask for just some help here.
So what’s coming to you is a comparative sheet.
And you’ll see on the left hand side the first council of Nicaea.
And following the first council of Nicaea things go pretty well but the controversies don’t go away.
The other ideas are out there.
So in 381,
60ish years later,
they get back together and they have another council.
This time 150 bishops.
And this is one of my favorite,
if you’ve ever been to church meetings,
probably any kind of meetings, but church meetings,
one of the people who was there recorded it this way.
They were shouting and hurling insults at each other well into the night.
So that’s your church meeting.
381,
they get together.
They had done this because Theodysus I declares that there must be orthodoxy in the church.
Like Constantine,
he’s tired of the infighting.
He’s tired of the arguing.
And he says get it figured out so these 150 bishops get together.
And they take the Nicene Creed,
or what was the statement of Nicaea,
and they formalize it.
And if you see the columns here on your sheet,
the left column is the 325 version.
And then the right column is the 381 version.
So let me just walk you through a couple of changes here that are,
I should say, they don’t do a lot with it.
They don’t really change it substantively.
Substantively.
Substantially.
Substantially.
But substantially.
So they change it a little.
I’ll figure that out later.
I’ll ask Google.
They don’t change the substance of it much.
But they do clarify a few things.
So, for instance, the first line here,
you see that on the right-hand side,
they add maker of heaven and earth.
And we’ll talk about why that may have been in a little bit.
If you look down at the fourth box,
who for us men and for our salvation on the left,
they add,
was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.
So they add the Spirit,
and they add something that speaks to the humanity of Christ here into the Creed.
If you go down to the box on the left that says,
“And in the Holy Ghost,” that’s everything they had to say at the time.
Now if you look to the right,
“And in the Holy Ghost the Lord and giver of life,
who proceedeth from the Father,
who with the Father and the Son together,
is worshiped and glorified,
and who spoke by the prophets.”
So now we have the Holy Spirit being at work with the Son and the Father in worship and glorification,
and it is the Spirit who we hear speaking in the words of the prophets.
So again, they enlarge the role of the Spirit here.
And then the next box you see they add church, baptism,
resurrection,
and the world to come.
And you see on the bottom of the left column a statement against those who would say there was a time when Jesus was not,
He was not before He was made,
and He was made out of nothing,
or He is of another substance or essence.
The Son of God is created, changeable, or alterable.
They are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
And so by and large the creed that we know as the Nicene Creed comes out of this second council,
the first council of Constantinople,
but the second version of the Nicene Creed,
and it remains that way.
It’s approved and made official,
and then in 451 they get together again in a place called Chalcedon,
and the Nicene Creed is adopted as the official statement of all the church in the Roman Empire.
And then,
so we have the Western and Eastern Church.
They’re both using the Nicene Creed.
The Western Church begins to do something that makes the Eastern Church angry.
And if you know the Nicene Creed,
if that was just something you ever had to memorize,
tell me what’s incomplete about,
and in the Holy Ghost,
the Lord Giver of Life,
who proceedeth from the Father.
If you were to look in our hymnal at the Nicene Creed,
after the word Father,
you will find the words,
“and from the Son.”
And in Latin, this word is fileoque,
“from the Son.” And so the Western Church begins adding this clause,
“who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Why?
Because if there are three, and they’re Trinity,
the Spirit can’t proceed only from the Father,
but must come from the Father and the Son.
Well, this very much makes the Eastern Church unhappy.
And it’s one of many things that makes them unhappy,
but it is a prime thing that makes them unhappy.
And they begin to argue and argue more until 1504.
The Eastern Church splits from the Western Church,
not inconsequentially over this issue as one of the major ones.
So that little phrase,
“and the Son,” has packed the wall up in Church history.
And next time you say the Nicene Creed,
you’ll notice it,
that the Church had said that.
Comments, questions, let me stop there for a moment.
The other thing that’s on the back of your sheet,
that sheet, you’ll see the Chalcedonian Creed,
and this is Les Creed and Moore’s statement.
And one of the things that’s interesting,
next time you read something like the Apostles’ Creed,
or the Nicene Creed,
or any other creed in the Church,
you will often know the issues of the day by what they choose to include.
And so as you read this one,
you’ll see in the first line, “We then,
following the Holy Fathers,
all with one consent,
teach people to confess,
one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood.” What’s that mean?
Christ is completely God,
completely person.
Next line,
“Truly God and truly man,
of a reasonable rational soul and body,
consubstantial,
coessential with the Father,
according to the Godhead,” and on and on.
In the line that leaves a large blank spot to the right,
look to this line,
“One and the same Christ,
Son, Lord,
only begotten to be acknowledged in,” what?
“Two natures,
inconfusively,
unchangeably,
indivisibly,
inseparably.” You know what they’re arguing about because of the strength of the language
which they claim the twofold natures of Christ and the threefold nature of God.
This is the battle that they’re fighting.
So let me stop there.
Any comments, questions?
To my knowledge,
things like modalism are gone.
I don’t know of any version of Christianity that theologically tries to argue that.
I don’t know of any version of Christianity that has done very well,
that theologically argues that the God of the Old Testament and the Christ of the New Testament are not the same.
There are some that practically seem to struggle with that,
but I don’t know anybody who officially says it.
They may be out there,
but I don’t know who they are.
I’ve got a quick question.
Yeah? When it says, “Born of the Virgin Mary,
the mother of God.”
Yeah.
Where are you?
About halfway down on the couch.
Oh,
yes.
So tell me what you’re saying.
Yeah.
This was an argument.
That would have been in Latin,
but prior to that,
Theoticus in Greek is the mother of God.
And the idea is that if Mary gave birth to Christ and Christ is God,
then Mary is the mother of God.
Now, a thousand-ish years down the road,
Luther and the boys,
we’re going to leave this idea behind.
You’re not going to hear Protestant use that phrase.
The mother of God is not going to be a title that a Reformed church
or a Protestant church is going to comfortably use in reference to Mary,
but there was a time in the Catholic church
that that was part of her title and her lineage.
Has the Catholic church gotten over that too?
I don’t think so.
No.
I think they’d still be comfortable with that language.
And again, the idea is that if she gave birth to Christ
and Christ is God,
then it’s fair to speak of her as the mother of God.
But then,
the Holy Spirit had something to do with her producing Christ?
Well, yes.
So there’s kind of a round rock.
Yeah.
You know, it takes about five seconds in any real discussion of the Trinity
to realize you’re in over your head.
I mean,
the church has looked for centuries for an analogy,
the shell, the white, and the yoke of an egg,
steam,
ice,
and water.
We’ve looked for hundreds of ways to try and talk about Trinity,
and we’ve found exactly zero good ones,
except Father, Son, and Spirit.
And if ever there was a doctrine that at some point your Sunday school teacher said, “It just is.
Quit asking questions.
It may well have been Trinity.”
Because they didn’t know either.
It is one of the most, I think,
mysterious and yet foundational doctrines that we profess.
Does the Roman church still think of Mary as also being virgin birth?
Yeah,
yes.
In fact,
not only have they historically,
and I believe currently,
held that Mary gave the virgin birth,
they will refer to her as the ever virgin Mary.
So they would deny, as the Protestants,
we read the scripture of Jesus’ brothers and sisters,
and we take that literally,
meaning that Mary and Joseph had children on their own after Jesus.
The Catholic church would read that as a reference to Jesus’ cousins or some kind of extended family,
and they would hold that Mary maintained her virginity throughout the rest of her life.
That she and Joseph never engaged in marital activity.
That it preserves her purity,
I think, is the idea.
That hasn’t been a problem for Protestants.
We didn’t care about that.
When it said Jesus had brothers,
we said, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Yes, sir?
It may just be worth pointing out that that’s why you see so much iconography of Mary.
Just to make that connection,
especially in the Eastern church.
You mean because they elevate her?
Yes. In fact, there are a number of prayers addressed to Mary,
and the idea is that as mother,
she has some influence over her son,
God’s son,
the son.
That’s hard for Protestants,
right? Because it doesn’t seem like it works that way.
She’s Jesus’ mother, so she gets to tell them what to do.
Among many things Catholics and Protestants have seen differently.
Okay, as if things,
if I haven’t bored you and confused you enough,
hold on.
So there is this thing called Gnosticism,
and it’s very difficult to speak to what Gnosticism is and isn’t,
because Gnosticism itself represents a guess at many things,
but there are these collection of beliefs that get labeled Gnosticism,
and the general consensus is they grow up about the time of Christianity.
There’s some thought that they predate Christianity,
but historically the idea has been that in the same window of Christianity,
there is this growth of Gnosticism and Gnostic ideas.
Where it comes from,
we don’t really know,
and it is not defined enough,
at least it doesn’t become defined enough to say this is what it was and this is what it believed.
Instead,
we see Gnosticism borrowing lots of things
and putting forth ideas,
and then we wonder about our ideas
and whether they got them from us or we got them from them.
And so the idea is the word Gnosis means knowledge,
and Gnosticism holds that there is secret knowledge,
and when one possesses this secret knowledge,
they not only understand the world,
but they set free the divine spark within them.
So in general terms,
Gnosticism holds that the material world,
our world, is created by a lesser God,
and in some versions of Gnosticism,
that’s the God of the Old Testament.
But that means that the God of the Old Testament is not big G God,
but little G God,
and not the ultimate God.
They also generally believe that the material world is evil,
and that we are freed from that evil by this knowledge,
and in general Gnosticism teaches a duality in just about everything.
So there’s body versus spirit,
good versus evil,
salvation versus judgment,
knowing versus ignorance,
light versus dark,
and you can begin to already see that these are some of the same images, metaphors,
and images we use to talk about the faith from our own Scripture.
In other words, Michael preached today, “I’m the light of the world,”
the prologue of the Gospel of John.
In him was the light,
and the light shined in the darkness,
the darkness didn’t overcome it.
And the Gnostics got very interested in some of the Christian story.
So there are Gnostic Gospels.
The Gospel of Judas is fairly Gnostic.
The Gospel of Mary,
which is attributed to Mary Magdalene,
is a Gnostic document.
The Gospel of Thomas,
in which alternative stories are told about Jesus,
and Jesus himself then is essentially turned into a Gnostic.
And this co-exists with Christianity,
and for a while becomes fairly popular.
There’s a version of Gnosticism called Manichaeism that happens a little bit later,
denying the omnipotence of God.
In other words,
Manichaeus held that there is God and Satan,
but they’re equal,
and they’re battling it out.
And we don’t know who will win,
and we participate in the struggle.
The human soul participates in the struggle by choosing a side.
And our soul is the battleground in which light and dark battle it out.
People are not inherently evil,
so they would reject the idea of the fall and natural depravity.
People are neutral.
Well, and this version of Gnosticism,
Manichaeism, it hangs on for about three to seven centuries,
and at one point is one of the most widespread religions in the world.
In fact, it became very popular in China.
And for a brief period in the fifth or sixth century,
it is perhaps the main rival to Christianity in the known world at the time.
It survives longer in the east,
dies out a little quicker in the west,
but these Gnostic ideas hang on.
Let me stop there.
Any questions or, Michael, anything I missed about Gnosticism?
Gnosticism, for biblical scholars, it’s kind of a unicorn.
It’s this great,
I don’t, they love,
well, I don’t know if they love it.
Some of them love it.
Okay.
It’s so popular, man.
I mean, what made it so popular,
and then made it die out?
I mean, what was that?
Well, in the west,
the church largely tried to kill it,
and eventually did.
In the east,
it just kind of fades to some other things.
It just kind of runs its course.
I’m sorry?
Wasn’t true?
Well, yeah.
People eventually lost faith in it, in essence.
So then the question,
the question that is intriguing for scholars,
I don’t know if it’s intriguing for us,
is the interplay between Gnosticism and Christianity.
And not to pick on Michael,
well, to pick on Michael a little,
who told you this morning that the gospel of John is his favorite gospel.
John,
if there’s a candidate for most likely to be a Gnostic book,
in our scripture is the winner.
Michael’s favorite gospel.
Are you hearing this?
No, but in the gospel of John,
we see this light and dark.
We see this battle.
We see humans being set free by how we say it, what you know,
that they will know the truth,
and it will set them free.
And this language sounds vaguely familiar in the context of Gnosticism.
Now, I want to be clear.
I’m playing around a little bit,
but I want to be clear.
Generally speaking,
people don’t think John was a Gnostic.
They do, however,
posit the idea that John’s gospel became very popular in Gnostic communities,
and that their Gnostic community may have been of significant importance in transmitting and keeping the gospel of John.
And eventually,
using it in small,
even somewhat secluded, secretive communities,
where Gnosticism and the language of Christianity did well.
Gnostics held the idea that Jesus was a savior of sorts.
In other words,
Jesus carried some of this divine knowledge.
Jesus imparted this on people, on followers.
Jesus was what?
The light.
That was very attractive language to the Gnostics.
But ultimately,
the church railed very strongly against Gnosticism.
You also see this in a book like Corinthians,
1st and 2nd Corinthians,
that will talk about secret wisdom,
and those who think they know things,
and those who have been caught up in spiritual experiences,
those verses may be evidence of Paul’s own battles with a kind of Gnosticism in the city of Corinth.
Primarily,
it was the idea that God was not over evil,
that light and dark were equal,
and that there was no given outcome to the struggle.
This clearly was offensive to the Jewish people and the sovereignty of God and their estimation,
and then like them after them,
certainly bothered the Christians.
We didn’t care for that language either.
Gnosticism, you could spend,
we could spend the rest of our life struggling with Gnosticism
and reading books about Gnostic and Christian overlap and influence,
but it was a source of heresies.
It was a breeding ground for what the church considered bad ideas,
and it was getting popular and growing right alongside Christianity,
and not only that,
but they were sharing,
they were dipping out of the same pool,
in some sense,
with Jesus’ stories and Christian teaching,
or at least Christian ideas and words,
and they were sort of cousins, I guess,
who shared some family lineage but did very different things with it,
and many of the early church heresies could possibly be attributed to that Gnostic influence.
And when we have gone back and looked at alternative Scriptures,
we generally find that those that purport to be of Jesus’ time generally are found not to be.
They almost never date as early as they claim,
but they almost always,
almost also inevitably,
turn out to be Gnostic in their background.
That makes any sense at all.
I’m sorry to,
okay.
Yeah?
Did they ever really define themselves,
or otherwise it almost sounds to me like our current age.
Well, you can solve your own problems.
A lot of people that are,
what do you say, postmodern,
they say, “I’m pretty good, and I can get better.”
Is that a similar thing,
or were they quite distinctly different than that?
Well, I hear two questions.
The first is,
I don’t think, to my knowledge, and I’m not, this isn’t my strong point,
so I’m guessing a little bit,
but to my knowledge,
Gnosticism never coalesced the way Christianity did.
It stayed in pockets.
There was a lot more diversity and fluidity in its lifetime than there was in Christianity.
Christianity kind of started like that,
but then within a couple of centuries got to a main thread,
and I don’t believe that happened the same way in Gnosticism.
As to Gnosticism’s current circumstance,
there would be lots of parts of Gnosticism that would probably play well in the “postmodern age.”
Yeah, I think some of Gnosticism,
you know, the idea of good versus evil,
the idea of divine power within us,
some of that would probably be well-received.
So find an agnostic,
what do you mean?
So an agnostic is,
as it has been said,
an atheist who leaves the door open a crack.
An agnostic,
“Ah,” the prefix “ah” negates the word “gnosis,” which is “no,”
so the word “agnostic”
pretty closely means “I don’t know.”
So an agnostic comes from a point of skepticism and doubt,
but isn’t there, as far as, say, the “ah” theist,
the “against God,” the “no God,”
the agnostic says, “probably no God,” but won’t say that for sure.
One definition also says there is no,
the agnostic has no proof of God.
Yeah,
I suppose that’s fair.
I’m interested about that question about why is this popular,
and I think maybe one thing that might help that is we don’t typically think of philosophy as a framework,
but in the ancient world they very much did think philosophically,
and so the idea of Plato,
specifically the idea of light and darkness,
if you’ve ever read the allegory of the cave,
there’s this very specific language about how we know what we know
and what reality actually is,
and Plato plays that without actually talking about the allegory.
He plays that out with the images of light and darkness,
and so Gnosticism, you could read, is like a secularizing
of religion.
You have this deep well,
like Pastor Quinn says,
you have this well of religious language and thought happening,
and you have this community that can tie that into this secularized philosophical framework that’s already very popular.
So those things feed each other in a way that may not be natural to us.
Yeah, that’s a great point,
Michael, and it was common still in Jesus’ day,
and you see it in Paul’s story,
you see remnants of it even in the Jesus story,
but that’s the more Jewish version of it.
In Paul’s story, for instance, in Athens,
where he goes and there are a collection of religious people just debating.
They’re just talking ideas,
their belief and this belief, and he says,
“There’s an unknown God,
and I’m going to tell you about that God,” and they listen to him and then begin arguing with him.
The idea of open discussions about ultimate truth was still very much in play in the early church.
The other thing that Gnosticism had going for it is that it’s essentially like a religious pizza ranch.
It grabs from Plato,
it goes to the Jewish salad bar and grabs a little something from them.
Christianity,
that sounds good,
and it is this syncretism is the word,
it just mixes and it’s free to take stuff from wherever it wants.
And so that has an appeal to people who like this part of Christianity,
but not that part of Christianity.
And we’ll circle back to that because that has been a charge leveled against the first world modern church,
is that we have been inclined to do something similar.
And so when we get to the part about talking about whether old heresies have been recycled into new heresies,
that may come up again.
Anything else?
I really do promise that from here on out,
there’s like half the people here that there were last week,
so next week it’d be like five of us eating soup.
But this is, I think, important groundwork.
A, it gives you some sense of how we got to some of the places we are.
But B, I do want to ultimately make a case that many new things aren’t new, they’re old.
And as Ecclesiastes says,
sometimes there is nothing new under the sun.
And so,
but to do that,
we have to go through some mud, I guess.
Well, thank you for your patience and your tolerance.
Thanks again for those who fed us this evening,
and have a great week.