Not Made
Nicene Creed 2:1-7
November 15, 2009
It is always is about Jesus. Virtually all the creeds in the Christian tradition spend the most time concerned with the event of Jesus Christ, and the Nicene Creed is long for talking about Jesus.
One of the oddest phrases - “begotten, not made” - is the crucial phrase to know why Jesus is the One for us. Many of us have grown up on the “begats” from the Biblical lists of generations. To beget meant to bring another into being, to father a child. Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on and on. The begatting hasn’t stopped yet, even though the language has changed.
The dilemma for the Gospels and early Christian writers was how to describe the relation of Jesus, Son of God, to God the Father without reducing Jesus to being a regular son of his father. If that were the case, God begatting Jesus, then the point of the Gospel is essentially neutered. What the early writers came up with is the pluperfect tense, “begotten,” a verbal adjective used only for Jesus. The definition of being begotten by God is intentionally non-distinct - who knows how God did it? A lot of theologians and ordinary Christians recognize that we are not able to speak for and describe God in any absolute way. For many the best way is to employ negative language, to say only what God is not - “apophatic” is the word. Jesus Christ is begotten - however in God’s way that works - Jesus is not made.
Why did all of this happen? The Nicene Creed and most others have adopted the concept of the Trinity, the Threefold Oneness of God, as the structural outline of their statements. The first section is always about God in whom we believe, the second section concerns Jesus, and the third involves the work of the Holy Spirit. All three are equally God, but they are not identical. They do distinct things, and this is why Jesus was begotten by God - while being of the same substance, the same stuff as God, Jesus does his stuff differently than God the Father, and the same is true for the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God differently, but that does not mean he is a different God as people like the infamous Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, Egypt, claimed in the 320’s.
If Arius were living today, he would be on TV acquiring a lot of market share. He did not write a text, for from the reports of his opponents he was a master of one-liners and popular songs that caught on like wild-fire. His most enduring slogan was “there was a time when he was not.” That is, Jesus was not eternally God, not always God, not always. God created, begat Jesus at a certain point in time, so Jesus had a beginning, like us.
Most people listen to this and think it is simply academic mumbo-jumbo with no real practical application to the life of the individual Christian or to the Church. There are not too many of us who do not like Christmas, and since we are only two weeks away from the beginning of Advent, maybe it’s time to talk about this Jesus we will be awaiting, because for Arius and for his legion of contemporary supporters Christmas is impossible.
Arius believed in God quite seriously and so do many people today. God is beyond description and limitation, all-powerful and all-knowing. The event of the incarnation when Jesus was born to Mary is an outrageous idea. How could eternity enter time? How could God become a human being without losing his divinity, and how could a human being be divine without losing her humanity? It doesn’t make scientific sense today and didn’t way back then either. One of the basic reasons for the secularization of Christmas that we all bemoan is theological - we don’t believe that there really was an incarnation, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, Emmanuel, God is with us. We can’t buy the incarnation, the stable and the manger, we can’t buy that the baby was Jesus, so over the years a different set of stories have been created around Santa Claus and the reindeer and the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Those who formulated the Nicene Creed struggled with this incarnation and emerged with the clear idea that Jesus was both fully God and fully human, not 50-50 or 1/3-2/3, but inexplicably for our human tongues and minds One Person with Two Natures. If you are having trouble grasping all this, don’t feel inferior, none of us really can comprehend it fully. The language is paradoxical as the way to demonstrate that we cannot pretend to understand God, for otherwise we could be God and do a better job. Some already do.
The idea that Jesus is fully God is hard for a lot of people to swallow, especially those who think rationally and scientifically, but it is even harder for most people to accept that Jesus was fully human. David Willis has pointed out three problems that I believe we will recognize when we doubt the full humanity of Jesus.
Lots of us have serious doubts about the validity and authority of the Bible. We are embarrassed by the violence, sexuality, and the miracles of the scriptures, and some suggest that we have the knowledge and responsibility to select out the portions of scripture that are above or behind the gross cultural humanness so frequently betrayed. We believe we are able to pinpoint what is the real Word of God throughout the messiness. Jesus was the real Word of God, so he couldn’t be human the way we sometimes have to be.
What this means, of course, is that whatever Jesus said or did in the Gospels has no application or meaning for our ordinary, all too human lives, but only for when you and me are pure and holy. If that has to be the case, I don’t know why we are here now.
Sentimentality and nostalgia often beset us and comfort us. We recall the emotions and wonders of days past, the good old days, stripped of everything ambiguous, tragic, messy and tedious. We want what Frederick Buechner called “a cost-free experience of intimacy.” An ideal world would just be beautiful music without all the difficulties we have to face when the music stops and we have to listen to the nightly national news. That Jesus lived, spoke and acted in the midst of, not in spite of, our human grittiness is why he can be our Saviour, that he can lead us to a fulfilled life. If Jesus were only a pure, holy, untouched by human weakness being, divine in fact, then I am afraid his example is useless for me, for I am too human.
Every once in a while I hear someone complain bitterly, “If this were a real church....!” A real church has a wonderful fellowship of people who unselfishly care for one another and for the poor and oppressed. There is no conflict among members, there are no financial woes, and there is no bureaucracy or institutionalism in this real church that frustrates and inhibits us. Everything works naturally - there is no need for committees. Find a real church like this and you will think you are in heaven, not on earth. A heaven made by human hands is a boring place, pretending not to be human, and honestly, human beings are too interesting to avoid. The church that Jesus established has to be human or it is not the church.
A few years back I mentioned the 70th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration was celebrated and there was an outcry from several members about what it said. In 1934 Germany, a group of Protestant Christians gathered at Barmen to issue a statement in the face of the reorganization of the German Church. Adolf Hitler wanted a German church, the adjective Christian was avoided, and he insisted that he was the head of this church and its ultimate arbiter of truth. The probable author of the Barmen Declaration, Karl Barth, wrote boldly that we have only one Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.”
Some of you objected to such language, thinking that this was a return to the parochial view of Christianity as the only true religion in the face of all the other world religions. Barth was not immediately concerned about other faiths leading to ultimate truth, he was concerned that a certain German Chancellor had forcefully appropriated for himself alone the final say on ultimate truth. Hitler wanted to possess the power to be God. We have witnessed sadly, tragically, what happens when a mere human being tries to be God. Hitler is only one in a long succession which flourishes today.
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten, begotten not made. This is not something to memorize, but to ponder and wonder and examine and struggle with every time we read it. Perhaps we don’t read it enough. Perhaps we ponder it even less.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan