THE CREED . . . .
. . . . in its various forms came into being more than fifteen hundred
years ago. It was devised NOT to tell us what we must believe, but what if we
are Christians we can NOT believe! For instance, the section about Jesus
. . . .
‘And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Lights, Very God of Very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father,
by whom all things were made:’
. . . . was very carefully framed because one heresy from the first
century claimed that Jesus was never man at all, but God dressed up as man (what
Hindus and others call an avatar) and so he never really suffered because God
the maker of all couldn’t really be made to suffer - how could he?
Simultaneously another heresy claimed that he was only man and couldn’t
possibly be God dressed as man: therefore he couldn’t be Saviour of the world,
only a teacher who taught everyone how to behave. And therefore, of course, he
couldn’t have been born of a Virgin or raised from the dead - I mean, mere men
aren’t!
When the paragraph above from the Creed was framed, it was deliberately
and carefully done to exclude both these heresies from being any part of
Christian belief. It said in effect, ‘You can’t be a Christian and still
believe these things. Christ is nothing less than God and nothing less than man.
As the Son of Man he suffered and died. As the Son of God he was raised
gloriously and lives eternally, and gives us eternal life because only God can
do that.’
There’s nothing new under the sun!