The CreedsGuardians Against Heresy

Former of Ideas – Plato

Greek was the “universal language” of the time, and the New Testament was written in Greek Like all languages, it is very tightly bound to the culture

of the people who speak it

Outside of the message and ideas in the Bible, the most powerful influence on all of Western Civilization is Plato His influence on how we see the world is incalculable,

and everybody (including – and in some ways especially – those in the Church) that would shape the way the Western World would think has lived in his shadow

The Logos

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God… Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” –John 1:1,3 λόγος: “form”, “reason”, “symbol”, etc.

In Plato’s thought, there are the “forms” of things (their essence) and the manifestation (existence) of them Physical instances of things like chairs are but

shadows of the true reality of “chair-ness”. Physical things are imperfect, die and decay (evil).

The “essence” is perfect and eternal (good).

The Logos Became Flesh?

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” – John 1:14

But wouldn’t that mean that the perfect became imperfect? The “good” became “evil”?

What does God have to say about that idea? (Genesis 1:31)

The Gnostics The Gnostics taught a particular mixture of Platonist

thought and Christian religion They identified God closely with “The Logos” and believed that

you are saved because God grants a mystical union with you, and you are therefore enlightened and are brought closer to God

Isn’t that what Christianity teaches?

“Gnostic” comes from the same word as our word “knowledge,” and basically means “Those in the know” There are modern-day people who still identify themselves as

Gnostics, but today it is mostly in the form of Charismatics and anabaptists

The “new gospels” that occasionally pop up are Gnostic texts. One recent example in popular culture referencing them is “The Divinci Code”

The Epistles of John are largely attempts to counter the enormous influence of Gnosticism

The Need for The Apostle’s Creed

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” The Gnostics held that the physical universe

is evil (since it is far from the Forms) and that therefore God, who is Good, did not make it.

Christ was Born

“And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary,” The Gnostics denied that God had taken human nature or a human body. Some of them distinguished between Christ, whom they acknowledged to

be in some sense divine, and the man Jesus, who was at most an instrument through whom the Christ spoke. They held that the man Jesus did not become the bearer or instrument of the Christ until the Spirit descended upon him at his baptism, and that the Spirit left him before the crucifixion, so that the Spirit had only a brief and tenuous association with matter and humanity.

Others affirmed that there was never a man Jesus at all, but only the appearance of a man, through which appearance wise teachings were given to the first disciples.

Against this the orthodox Christians affirmed that Jesus was conceived through the action of the Holy Spirit (thus denying the Gnostic position that the Spirit had nothing to do with Jesus until his Baptism), that he was born (which meant that he had a real physical body, and not just an appearance) of a virgin (which implied that he had been special from the first moment of his life, and not just from the baptism on).

Silly People… ?

Much of the stigma surrounding all things “carnal” is based in remnants of this heresy

Sex, for example, is often seen as a “necessary evil,” and that’s the primary reason why Roman Catholism insists on the perpetual virginity of Mary, since it teaches that she was untouched by sin See for example sections 499-500 in the Catholic Catechism

When we say that temptation comes from “the flesh, the world and the Devil,” we aren’t saying that the flesh or the world are inherently evil – any more than sex is inherently evil – but that in our fallen state and the taint that our sin has placed upon them, that we need to be careful to keep things focused on God

A Place in History

“Suffered under Pontius Pilate,” There were many stories then about gods who

died and were resurrected, but they were offered as myths, as non-historical stories symbolic of the renewal of the vegetation every spring after the seeming death of winter

Jesus – clearly identified as being God himself – died at a particular time and place in history

“Gospel” comes from Old English: gōd spell which means “good news”

While the Bible contains a lot of doctrine, it is above all True. True in the spiritual sense AND in the historical “flesh and blood” sense.

Christ Died

“Was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into Hell.” Here the Creed hammers home the point that

he was really dead. He was not an illusion. He was nailed to a cross. He died. He had a real body, a corpse, which was placed in a tomb. He was not merely unconscious – his spirit left his body and went to the realm of the dead. The reference to the descent into Hell is here to make it clear that the death of Jesus was not just a swoon or a coma, but death in every sense of the word.

The Holy Catholic Church

“The third day he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, ” The Gnostics believed that the most important Christian

doctrines were reserved for a select few: those “in the know” who have had a special mystical experience

The orthodox belief was that the fullness of the Gospel was to be preached to the entire human race. Hence the term "catholic," or universal, which distinguished them from the Gnostics

Forgiveness

“the forgiveness of sins,” The Gnostics considered that what men needed was not

forgiveness, but enlightenment. Ignorance, not sin, was the problem.

Some of them, believing the body to be a snare and delusion, led lives of great asceticism (self-denial).

Others, believing the body to be quite separate from the soul, held that it did not matter what the body did, since it was completely foul anyway, and its actions had no effect on the soul. They accordingly led lives that were not ascetic at all.

Either way, the notion of “forgiveness” was alien to them.

Resurrection of the Body

“the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. AMEN” The chief goal of the Gnostics was to become free forever

from the taint of matter and the shackles of the body, and to return to the heavenly realm as Pure Spirit. They totally rejected any idea of the resurrection of the body.

When people think that we’re meant to live as spirits forever in the presence of God, they’ve only got it half right. We are meant to live in physical bodies. God made Adam and Eve in bodies, and just because sin has corrupted the creation does not mean that “physicalness” itself is evil. Our glorified bodies will be given back to us.

As it says in Revelation 21, God will create a “new heaven and new earth” for us to live in.

The physical world will be remade for us to inhabit. (Albeit with a great many changes.)

The Need for a New Creed

The Apostle’s Creed was never “formally” put together, and because it was focused primarily on a particular heresy and very general statement of faith, it left a lot of room for many other heresies Legend has it that each of the twelve “verses” was done

by Inspiration by each of the 12 Apostles While there were references to it by the second century,

the first known writing in its current form was from around 710

When Arius of Alexandria petitioned Constantine for support in 327 AD, it became clear that a more formal, precise statement of what “Christian” means was needed

Thus came the Council of Nicea…

Arius of Alexandria

The Arian heresy is often described as the denial of the deity of Christ, but like everything with that big an impact, it’s not nearly that simple

According to the Arians, Christ is “the first and greatest creation of Jehovah God and His active agent in creating all things.” And “the Son is a mighty god but not Jehovah God.”

In Defense of Arius

“Was the Arian heresy the denying of divinity of Jesus Christ? I think not at all: Jesus has divine origin, He is the Son of God, same substance but not coeternal.

In other words, there was a time that Jesus was not, but the Father was, since the Father is eternal, no beginning no ending. Jesus may have no ending at all, but He had a beginning, since he is the beloved Son of God.

The Arian heresy is the great claim against the tradition of the Trinity, which was never mentioned by Jesus, but by other non-Christian religions, with a great influence during the days of Jesus. (Much earlier Egyptians had their trinity too. So did the later cultures, up to the Romans themselves, with the Hellenic tradition.) There’s no Trinity. We must worship one God, the creator of all exiting things. Otherwise we may fall into paganism.” – from a post in a religious newsgroup

Modern Day Arians

What modern heresy is a direct descendant of the Arian heresy? Jehovah’s Witnesses, who point to Arius as

one of their Church Fathers.

The Council of Nicea Fights Back

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,” Here and elsewhere (such as John 1:14) the Greek has

“monogenetos huios,” an English translation may read either “only Son” or “only begotten Son.” The Greek is ambiguous.

The root GEN is found in words like “genital, genetics, generation,” and suggests “begetting.” However, it is also found in words like “genus” and suggests “family” or “sort” or “kind.”

Accordingly, we may take monogenetos to mean either “only begotten” or “one-of-a-kind, only, sole, unique.”

Eternally Begotten

“eternally begotten of the Father,” Arius was fond of saying, “The Logos is not

eternal. God begat him, and before he was begotten, he did not exist.”

The Athanasians (Bishop Athanasius was the leader of those that battled the Arians) replied that the begetting of the Logos was not an event in time, but an eternal relationship

Light from Light

“God from God, Light from Light,” A favorite analogy of the Athanasians was the following: Light

is continuously streaming forth from the sun. (In those days, it was generally assumed that light was instantaneous, so that there was no delay at all between the time that a ray of light left the sun and the time it struck the earth.)

The rays of light are derived from the sun, and not vice versa. It is possible to imagine that the sun has always existed, and always emitted light. The Light, then, is derived from the sun, but the Light and the sun exist simultaneously throughout eternity. They are co-eternal. In that same way the Son exists because the Father exists, but there was never a time before the Father produced the Son.

The analogy is further appropriate because we can know the sun only through the rays of light that it emits. To see the sunlight is to see the sun. As Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

Of One Being With the Father

“true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” This line: "of one essence with the Father, of one

substance with the Father, consubstantial with the Father,” was the acid test. It was the one formula that the Arians could not interpret as meaning what they believed.

Without it, they would have continued to teach that the Son is good, and glorious, and holy, and a Mighty Power, and God's chief agent in creating the world, and the means by which God chiefly reveals Himself to us, and therefore deserving in some sense to be called divine.

They would have continued to deny that the Son was God in the same sense in which the Father is God. Arius and his immediate followers would have denied that they were reducing the Son to the position of a high-ranking angel.

Repeating the Apostle’s Creed

“Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” Only pausing here to note that the older translation of

the last phrase has here simply, “He suffered and was buried.” Apparently by the time of Nicaea, it was no longer necessary to emphasize that Christ had really died at Calvary, as it had been spelled out in the Apostles’ Creed.

When the more modern translation was done, they decided to insert the “death” clause just to make sure nobody forgot that it’s clear what happened.

The Start of the Sundering

“On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son].” The words shown in brackets, “and from the Son,” are a

Western addition to the Creed that was originally agreed on by a Council representing the whole Church, East and West

Without going into too much detail, the Eastern Church did not agree with this choice of wording and the fact that the West “slipped it in” drove further the wedge between East and West. (Technically, the East had a legitimate complaint against how the Western Church handled the situation, though they were wrong in their understanding of the doctrine.)

Spoken Through the Prophets

“With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.” This line was directed against the view that

the Holy Spirit did not exist, or was not active, before Pentecost

One Baptism

“We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. AMEN” The “one baptism” part will become important

later when St. Augustine battled the Donatists Briefly, the Donatists believed that if you

received an “illegitimate baptism” then it didn’t count and you needed to be baptized again

Where do you hear this heresy today? What is the Biblical answer?

What’s Not Said

As with anything of this type, it should be noted the kinds of things that were left out of Creed, because in doing so the framers were essentially saying that disagreements about such things were not considered heretical For example, many of the “practical” teachings of

Jesus are missing entirely, especially that which has to do with the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of This World

Constantine, for one, would never have allowed a Creed that spoke against worldly ambitions, and that omission would be used when the Church started to gain tremendous worldly power