During the nearly twenty years my wife was Sunday school superintendent in two congregations, I wrote a weekly newsletter to help parents review the week’s lessons and apply the point we made to their children’s lives. One feature was the Did you know? paragraphs. The idea was to teach the parents something they did not know about the story. These posts expand on those paragraphs for this blog.
There are two stories about creation at the beginning of the Bible. The first one is an overview of how God made the world and everything in it. The second one tells the story of how God made Adam and Eve.
The first story in the Bible has a rhythm. Every day we hear that “God said let … and it was so, and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1) Every day ends: “evening and morning was the __ day.” God made everything in a very orderly fashion. First He made the land, sea, and sky. Then He filled it with living creatures. On the sixth day, He made men and women in His own image. When God had finished creation, He called it very good.
The world is far from very good today. The sin of Adam and Eve brought sin, suffering, grief, and death into the world. Yet the beauty and wonder of creation is still there. One day, Jesus will return and take away this curse once and for all. Then we all will see the work God has done and say with Him, It is very good.
[Eighth in a series of posts on how to read the Bible]
Anachronism is taking any historical custom, person, object, or event into a time period other than its own. The Biblical narratives exist in time. (Narratives are those passages that relay specific events as a narrated story). They are to be heard and read from within their contextual window.
There was a common refrain around twenty years ago: What Would Jesus Do? The notion was that Jesus, as revealed in the scriptures, could serve as a moral guide to aid your decision-making. If you would just imagine Jesus in your situation, the correct answer would become clear.
The anachronistic fallacy here is that Jesus does not walk the earth in my time. By trying to drag Him into my situation here, I’m ignoring the teachings in their context. And I’m about to put my words into Jesus’ mouth somehow to sanctify my choices into biblical truth.
Let’s try another fitment. “Jesus was a socialist, distributist, capitalist, or anarchist.” Jesus lived 1800 years before most of the codified economic systems we know developed. His experience with taxes, market forces, production, and consumption looked far different from our own. The application we should pull from “render unto Caesar” is simply: be a faithful Christian first and the best citizen, resident, or alien you can be second. Anything further pulls Jesus into our temporal context.
For a more timely application that will likely age poorly, would Jesus wear a mask? He came healing the sick. So, surely, that means that he would wear a mask. Again, our specific time and concerns applied to Jesus. We couldn’t discern the answer to that question.
This one dials in more tightly upon the problem with that question. It’s not a good question. Jesus came to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, cast out demons, and forgive sin as signs of what was to come. These signs demonstrate the fullness of God in human flesh subsisting. Jesus healed, recreated, forgave, and even raised the dead to life again to teach what His death meant. Jesus died to forgive the sins of the world. All the brokenness and other evidence of the corruption of sin will fade away in the blinking of an eye at the resurrection of all flesh. His life and ministry testify to that. Who cares what political system, hand sanitizer, or chicken sandwich he may or may not have preferred?
Dear Baptized, let us abandon anachronism and bless the Lord of time and eternity! Thanks be to God!
The legacy of Saint Athanasius is one of standing firm in the face of opposition to the word of God. Throughout his 45 years as Bishop, including 17 years in exile, he stood unwaveringly against the errors surrounding him. The Arian heresy, denying the divinity of Jesus, and all the derived and adjacent heresies are still with us. But we have a firm confession from the Word of God to fall back on in defense of the faith. That is the continuing gift given to us by Athanasius and those of his theological tradition. “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:25-30)
Alexandria in Egypt, the bishopric of Athanasius, is no longer a center of Christendom. Augustine of Hippo, who owes much to Athanasius, and is a father for us in the western church, presided over a region of North Africa that is no longer a center of Christianity. It’s wise for us to remember, but the centers of Christianity Today may not be the centers of Christianity tomorrow.
The concluding remarks of the Athanasian Creed can give us pause. While reinforcing the bodily resurrection, the creed seems to assert works righteousness.
“He will come to judge the living and the dead. At His coming, all people will rise again with their bodies and give an account concerning their own deeds. And those who have done good will enter eternal life, and those who have done evil into eternal fire.”
We should always hear these words of judgment within the context of Jesus’ work of Salvation for us. The accounting of our deeds is not done according to human reason. Just as Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. So, by faith, we receive eternal salvation. Let’s consider the sheep and the goats.
The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, chapter 25: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats … Then the righteous [sheep] will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? … Then [the unrighteous goats] also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’”
Neither the sheep nor the goats can make any sense out of this accounting. Those who are righteous by faith are ever more aware of their sin and their need for salvation day-by-day. Those who condemn themselves by their sin and persistent unbelief are ever self-justifying and judging themselves to be “good” by their own standard apart from faith. And Saint Paul gives us this useful nugget.
The epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 2: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
The good works are credited to us, sheep. These works themselves are produced by faith, which is from God, alien to our nature. And those works are prepared for us beforehand. The works we set out to do may not even be among them. Dear Christians, live in the Word and in the Christian faith. The Spirit produces faith and good works from the Gospel of salvation in Christ Jesus.
Dear Baptized, let us celebrate the faith credited to us as righteousness!
The errors faced by the early church in Alexandria were not just about the Trinity. There were also Christological confusions. Saint Athanasius was present and attentive for the decisions of the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Concerning the person and nature of Jesus Christ, the term, ὁμοούσιος (homoousios — of the same substance), was used to sort out the heresies. But the wisdom of man thinks itself wiser than the wisdom of God.
The third section could almost be its own creed. It deals with Jesus’ incarnation. The two natures in the one person of Christ are on full display here.
In the Athanasian Creed, we reject Eutychianism, that Jesus’ human and divine natures merged into a new, different nature. We also reject Nestorianism, that the two natures of Christ are not unified in His person. And, we reject the Gnostic notion that we will be free from matter and our bodies, specifically in the next life. These heresies or errors generally arise from an attempt to fill in the blanks of the mysteries of God with our human reason. That is not a good practice we should engage in. Some things are known to us. And some are not yet revealed.
The Eutychians held that Jesus’ human and divine natures merged into a new nature. In their intent to firmly affirm the unity of God and man in Christ, they created something different. The Eutychian Jesus must be separate from the Trinity because he is of a different substance. His human and divine natures make him a new, unique thing that is neither God nor man. Since it is not either, it cannot be truly God.
“But pastor, why does that matter?” That’s a perfectly fair question. Only God can atone for all the sins of all of mankind. We know that Jesus died for our sins, each and every one, and all together. So, our understanding of the nature of Christ has to allow for that truth to remain constant. Instead, we confess, “our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is at the same time both God and man.”
The Nestorians found the other ditch. Like the brilliant Vizzini from the movie: The Princess Bride, “clearly I cannot choose the cup in front of you.” If the complete unity of the two natures into a new nature is wrong, then the two natures of Christ must not be unified in His person. This creates a host of new potential misunderstandings. Does Jesus retain his humanity? Did Jesus remain human throughout His ministry, life, death, and resurrection? Did God depart from the man, Jesus, at any point? The answers to those questions, in many cases, are their own unique error, which we may discuss at another time.
The rubber meets the road here. On the cross, God turned his back on Jesus, who is also God. On the cross, God the Son died for our sins. And God the Son was raised to life again. All of the hows, whys, and wherefores are not for us to know. We’re given exactly what we need to understand and trust completely that our sin was atoned for on Calvary.
“He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ: one, however, not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.”
The Gnostics had a notion that we will be free from matter and our bodies one day. Specifically, we will be only spiritual in the next life. The taking up of Enoch and Elijah bodily into heaven speaks against this. Job’s confession that he will see God face-to-face with his own eyes does so. Mary Magdalene confesses the resurrection to Jesus just before he restores Lazarus to life. In the resurrection, Jesus eats and drinks with His disciples and invites them to touch Him. He is with them bodily, not spiritually.
In the Christian faith, we live with the certainty that the resurrection promises we will be whole and complete. This is a challenge, especially at the time of the death of our own loved ones. We want to know that everything is complete for them. We want to know that they are “in a better place.” Yet the Bible teaches us it isn’t quite done. The promise of salvation isn’t full and complete until we are resurrected in our bodies to eternal life. We confess the resurrection of our bodies! “At His coming, all people will rise again with their bodies.”
Instead of intellectualizing the complex in a way that makes sense, we are better served by acknowledging the witness of scripture. Some things are clear and known to us. Other mysteries are not revealed to us in this life. But, we can know with certainty that all of the things pertinent to our Salvation are clear and known.
Dear Baptized, let us praise the one Christ, truly God and truly man, for our salvation!
The exact date and author of the Athanasian Creed are unknown. It derives its name from the theological tradition of Saint Athanasius. It is typically dated to the late 4th or early 5th century AD. Augustine’s On the Trinity (415 AD) has very similar language to the creed. Athanasius’ lifelong battle against the heresies prevalent in the early Christian church in North Africa helped shape a theological tradition that heavily influenced the Western church.
“Just as we are compelled by the Christian truth to acknowledge each distinct person as God and Lord, so also are we prohibited by the catholic religion to say that there are three Gods or Lords.”
In the second section of the creed, we confess the personhood of the Trinity, each distinct from the other. This rejects Modalism, which holds that God changes masks, appearances, or functions but remains the same in person in each case. Rather, we confess that the individual persons of the Triune God possess unique attributes to the exclusion of the others.
This distinctness of a person also describes the divine economy. That is economy in the sense of interrelationship, not of money. Within the Trinity, there is an economy of relationship between the persons. The Father is eternally neither made nor begotten. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit is eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son, neither created nor begotten.
These expressions of the Christian understanding of the Trinity push back against modalism by affirming the concurrence of personhood. It is impossible for the Father to put on a Son mask. He is eternally the Father, and His personhood is unique from the Son. The Son cannot put on a Holy Spirit mask because His attributes in His person are distinct from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot wear the attributes of the Father because they are unique from His own attributes. All of these attributes are eternally the attributes of the persons of God.
But these immutable characteristics do not make a hierarchy. All persons of the Trinity are equally God. And, none is before or after another.
The Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. The Holy Spirit is God. The Son is God. The Father is God, coeternal and coequal.
Dear Baptized, the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity is to be worshipped!
Saint Athanasius was bishop and patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt (under Roman control) from 328 to 373 AD. He attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD as secretary to his predecessor, Alexander. Athanasius was ordained as bishop and patriarch after Alexander’s death. In his 48 years presiding over the region, he was exiled five times, by four different Roman emperors, for 17 years, over theological controversies in North Africa.
Each of the three sections of the creed begins with a similar language. The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds start with “I believe…” But the Athanasian Creed takes a different approach. Rather than solely confessing together with one voice. Here, we also exhort one another, “Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith.” Then, in each section, we confess the catholic faith.
We Lutherans need not fear the word “catholic.” The term catholic does not refer to the modern Roman Catholic Church, but to the universal, invisible, orthodox, faithful church of Christ on earth. We retain the use of the term “catholic” in the Athanasian Creed in opposition to the papal church of Rome. “Catholic” simply means “universal,” and as such, we boldly confess it from our Lutheran identity.
The first section addresses the unity of our Triune God. He is uncreated, infinite, and eternal, “not three gods, but one God.” This language rejects Subordinationism, that the Son and the Spirit are less God than that Father is God. Rather, God is of one substance. Subordinationism was, in part, an overcorrection for the error of modalism. Subordinationists were seeking to clarify the distinctness of the person within the Trinity. Their over correction created a theological position that hedged upon tritheism. To protect our understanding from merging God into just one thing of only one sort, they created an understanding where God can easily be three things of three sorts. And these three loosely connected God characters have a hierarchy within their pantheon. This is an error.
The modalist error is also addressed by the second section of the Creed. This serves to remind us that the opposite of an error isn’t always a truth. Sometimes the opposite of an error can simply be an error in the opposite direction.
“But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one: the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” The God-ness of the Trinity is whole and one. The attributes of God in His unity are shared and are one: uncreated, infinite, eternal, and almighty. But these are not a dozen attributes, four of each, unique to each person. There are four attributes that each person possesses as one. There are not three gods, but one God. There are not three lords, but one Lord. There are not three eternals, but one Eternal. We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
Don’t let yourself be dismayed or discouraged by these complicated understandings. They were intense struggles for the early church and remain intellectual difficulties for us today. The big takeaway from the Athanasian Creed is that we can never fully understand the Trinity. We can, with the help of the fathers of the faith before us, identify those things that are outside the proper understanding.
Dear Baptized, let us celebrate the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity!
On Trinity Sunday, most Lutheran churches confess the Athanasian Creed together. The creed was composed in keeping with his theology about the Trinity, though not by St. Athanasius himself. The creed flagrantly uses the term “catholic” in a way that can startle us sensitive snowflakes of the Lutheran tradition.
St. Athanasius? Catholic? Are we Romanists, now?
No, we are not now, nor do we desire to be a part of the Roman Catholic church. “But, Pastor, we just said the ‘catholic faith,’ like three times in the Athanasian Creed last Sunday.” Yes, yes, we did. And I have good news! At Mt. Calvary, we confess it again on several Sundays throughout the church year.
Our Sunday bulletin at Mt. Calvary included this little note concerning our catholicity. “catholic faith* — The term catholic does not refer to the modern Roman Catholic Church, but rather to the universal, invisible, orthodox, faithful church of Christ on earth. We retain the use of the term “catholic” in the Athanasian Creed in opposition to the papal church of Rome. “Catholic” simply means” universal,” and as such, we boldly confess it from our Lutheran understanding.”
There are Christians who eschew the use of creeds in the church. They’ll say things like, “No creed but Christ” and, “no book but the bible.” But those statements are creeds of their own. We derive the English word creed from the Latin credo, which means, “I believe.” So, our friends in the “no creeds” crowd are creedingly creeding a creed against the use of creeds. (The large majority of the global Christian community is from credal faiths like ours.)
The three ecumenical creeds are: The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Creeds, as a whole, exist to speak contrary to positions held outside the faith. Each of these creeds exists solely to communicate the faith we all hold in opposition to a novel heresy against the faith. Ecumenical refers to that which pertains to the whole Christian church. The ecumenical creeds are embraced and confessed by all of Christendom.
The Athanasian Creed speaks primarily against the Arian sect of the early Christian church. Arius, for whom the sect is named, struggled with the stuff of which God is. He taught against the idea that God the Father and God the Son are of the same substance.
Now, the Nicene Creed says, “… of the same substance with the Father…” After the first ecumenical council in Nicea (325 AD), the notion that there are differences in substance should have been put to bed with all the subordination it entails. But Arianism remained a problem for the church.
The creed can be treated as two or three parts. Three parts will work adequately for this discussion. The first part deals with the unity of our Triune God. He is uncreated, infinite, and eternal, “not three gods, but one God.” This language rejects Subordinationism, that the Son and the Spirit are less God than the Father, who is God. Rather, God is of one substance, not “three gods or lords.”
In the second section, we confess personhood, each distinct from the other. This rejects Modalism, which holds that God changes masks, appearances, or functions but remains the same in person in each case. Rather, we confess that the individual persons of the Triune God possess unique attributes to the exclusion of the others. The Father: unbegotten, The Son: begotten, and the Holy Spirit: proceeding, are all unique in function for us Christians. There are not three of any, but one of each person within the Trinity in Unity.
The third section deals with Jesus’ incarnation. The two natures of Christ are on full display here. The Son is “equal to the Father with respect to His divinity, less than the Father with respect to His humanity.” We reject Eutychianism, that Jesus’ human and divine natures merged into a new, different nature. “He is God, begotten from the substance of the Father before all ages; and He is man, born from the substance of His mother in this age: perfect God and perfect man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father with respect to His divinity, less than the Father with respect to His humanity.” We also reject Nestorianism, that the two natures of Christ are not unified in His person. “He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ: one, however, not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.”
The third section also rejects the Gnostic notion that we will be free from matter and our bodies, specifically in the next life. On the contrary, we confess the resurrection of our bodies! “At His coming, all people will rise again with their bodies.”
Dear Baptized, let us celebrate the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity! Thanks be to God!
With the celebration of the Sunday of the Holy Trinity, the church’s liturgy shifts themes. From Advent to Pentecost, the focus of all lessons across all lectionaries is on the earthly ministry of Jesus. With the feast of the Holy Trinity, we consider what this means for our lives and the life of the Church. The color of all our paraments and vestments is green to reflect growth in our faith in Christ. Together with the Season of Epiphany, the Pentecost/Trinity Season is called Ordinary Time.
These Sundays are not called ordinary because there is something routine about them. It comes from the fact that each week in the season is numbered rather than named. It is the tradition of the church that each Sunday between Advent and Pentecost has a unique Latin name. You may have seen these in bulletins. The weeks of ordinary time, however, are numbered by the weeks after Epiphany, Pentecost or Trinity.
There are so many Sundays after Pentecost or Trinity that most lectionaries change the themes twice or more. Most make these changes at the celebrations of St. Lawrence Day and St. Michael and All Angels (Michaelmas). If your church uses Graduals between the Old Testament and New Testament lessons and/or a thematic alleluia verse, you will notice the shift. The Gradual and the alleluia verse changes.
In some American Lutheran churches, another feature of the liturgy in ordinary time is a shorter preface. The preface is the prayer of praise said by the pastor before the Sanctus. In these churches, the pastor goes directly from “that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto You O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God …” to “therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising you and saying…” In the first half of the church year and on special days, they add a proper preface to it, related to the day itself.
Encore Post: in late May 1838, Pastor Jesse Hoover died. In the frontier town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, his congregations mourned. Along with them, the whole region missed him, too. Lutheran pastors were rare in the dark forest. Elder Adam Wesel of St. Paul’s congregation wrote to the Mission Committee of the Pennsylvania Ministerium for help. Among other things, he pleaded:
“Have pity, honored fathers and brothers and send us a Pastor… If you canvas the northern part of Indiana you will soon see how important it is that you send us a faithful Shepherd. The harvest is great but unfortunately there are no workers. If it is not possible to send us a Pastor, dear brothers, then send us a circuit rider. We hunger and thirst for the Word of God.”
The letter arrived in Pennsylvania at a perfect time. The committee had planned to send a survey missionary West in September. But their candidate could not go. They were without a man to send.
In August 1838, a letter from Johann Häsbärt arrived at the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Ministerium Mission Society, highly recommending Friedrich Wyneken. The Executive Committee invited Wyneken to visit Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to meet with them. In the company of Häsbärt, Friedrich met with the committee.
So convinced of his fitness for the task and likely moved by his zeal for the work, the Missionary Society set aside its usual practice of waiting until September to send out its workers. They commissioned him to “move to Indiana, to search for scattered German Protestants to preach to them, and, if possible, gather them into congregations.” While the Committee intended Wyneken to make Indiana his base of operations, they also directed him to labor in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Credentials in hand, Wyneken embarked upon his ministry as a Missionary, traveling in the company of Häsbärt as far as Havre de Grace, Maryland.
In Pittsburgh, Wyneken met for the first time C. F. Schmidt, the editor of Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, who would prove a close friend and the channel through which Wyneken’s first appeals would reach the world. From Pittsburgh, Wyneken traveled by train and canal boat to Zelienople, Pennsylvania, where he purchased a horse and cheerfully rode off to be, as his friend C. F. W. Walther would later describe him, the Lutheran Apostle of the West.
Encore Post: The Ascension is an important event in the life of Jesus and in the life of the Church. It is the final part of the work which redeemed us: the cross, where our sins were paid for; the resurrection, where the power of the grave was broken; and the ascension, which restored all His honor, glory, authority, and power. From the early church over 1500 years ago until recent years, the church celebrated the Ascension on the fortieth day after Easter, or on the Thursday ten days before Pentecost. In the 21st century, many churches celebrate Ascension on the Sunday before Pentecost.
When He ascended, Jesus left His Church with a promise, a mission, and a blessing. He promised to be with us always until the end of time. He gave us our mission. We would join His mission to seek and save the lost by going to the whole world, being witnesses to His life, death, and resurrection, proclaiming the good news of salvation, baptizing, and teaching all He commanded us. As He ascended, He blessed them as Aaron and the High Priest did and as pastors do to this day, giving us His peace. He promised to be with us always, until the end of time itself.
Now the church waits patiently for him to return. On a day that no one knows, Jesus will return. On that day, he will raise our bodies from the grave, judge all the living and the dead, and bring an end to sin, death, and the power of the devil. God will live among us again, throwing the greatest marriage feast of all time. He will dry every tear from our eyes.
