Transcript

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.

With these words of the Creed, we come to the heart of the matter.

For all of distinctively Christian faith begins and ends with a particular person: Yeshua from Nazareth, the only begotten Son of the God of Israel, light for light, true God from true God.

This proclamation, no less shocking nearly 2,000 years later, draws us into the depths of divine love and into the mystery of the incarnation.

So, we've been looking at the opening moves of the Nicene Creed, talking about God and about God's creation.

We now come to this decisively important article: I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.

Now, I think especially for religious people, those words can kind of slide quickly through our minds.

The Lord Jesus Christ.

Oh yeah, I know all about Him.

I think it might be good to defamiliarize ourselves a bit and take that phrase apart.

Let's look at those four words: One Lord, Jesus Christ.

Starting with the name Jesus.

Well, Jesus translates the Greek "Iesous."

That's a word that Paul uses all the time.

And Jesus renders the Hebrew Yeshua or Yehoshua.

The word Joshua, the name Joshua, it's the same thing.

Yeshua means Yahweh, God, saves.

This Jesus whom we profess our faith in is the Savior.

Now, salvation is a metaphor, really.

Salus in Latin means health.

The Salvator, that's the bearer of health.

Our word Savior comes from that.

Jesus, therefore, is the one who's going to bring to a sin-sick world the divine healing.

He's the Savior.

You know, it's interesting, that word in Latin, salus, and salve, you'd say to someone, say, hello, good health to you, salve.

The closest cousin in English would be the word salve, S-A-L-V-E. The Salvator, the Savior, Yeshua, is the one who brings the healing balm.

Now, something else, and no first-century Israelite would have missed this, that name Yeshua, Yeshua, Joshua, calls to mind the Old Testament Joshua, the second in command of Moses.

Moses doesn't enter the Promised Land, but Joshua does.

He leads the Israelite people in the conquest of the Promised Land.

Joshua is a warrior against the enemies of Israel.

And so this Yeshua, this Joshua in whom we profess our faith, will also be a warrior.

Though, mind you, not in the manner of the Old Testament Joshua.

He's going to fight in a very distinctive way, and I'll get there in a few minutes.

Jesus.

The next word, Christ.

Christ.

That English word translates to the Greek "Christos," which translates to Hebrew "Mashiach."

So, Messiah comes from that.

The Mashiach is the anointed one.

Now, in the Old Testament, both priests and kings were anointed, but the Mashiach par excellence was King David.

King David who united the tribes, expanded the great empire, and who also, mind you, acted as a kind of priest because he brings the Ark of the Covenant into the holy city of Jerusalem.

The Mashiach, David.

But it became very clear in the Old Testament that though David was a great figure, he was also a fallen, compromised figure.

He also didn't fully realize the purposes of kingship and priesthood.

And so ancient Israel, you can see it in the prophets and the Psalms especially, begins to long for a definitive David, a definitive Mashiach, anointed one, who would fulfill the destiny of the people of Israel.

What's being claimed here in the title given to Yeshua, Yeshua Mashiach, is that he is this Davidic figure: warrior, king, priest.

Now, let's go back to the beginning of that phrase.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.

Lord, in English, translates "kurios" in Greek.

You hear that all the time in Paul, don't you?

Jesus kurios, Jesus the Lord.

"Kurios" translates "Adonai" in the Hebrew.

Adonai was the word used for God.

Are we putting our faith in a human figure, this Yeshua Mashiach?

Well, yes, in a way, this long-expected new David.

But we're also acknowledging that this new David is more than a merely human figure.

He's also Adonai.

He's also the one Lord.

Here's a very curious thing, everybody.

If you look now throughout the Old Testament, you do indeed see these texts about the new David, the longing for this Davidic warrior, this Davidic king who will come and definitively achieve David's purposes.

But you also find texts that clearly say that God, the God of Israel, is going to come to rescue his people.

I myself will shepherd my people.

And then there are even texts that read those two things together.

But somehow the Davidic king will also be Yahweh himself, saving, rescuing, shepherding his people.

See, I think all of that is contained in this little line: I believe in the one Lord, Jesus Christ.

You know, maybe again, just to defamiliarize it, we believe in the one Adonai, Yeshua Mashiach.

In some ways, the whole of the Old Testament expectation is contained in that line.

Bishop, it can seem to some that there's a big difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.

Is this the same God?

Yes, and I would certainly deny the claim that they're two different gods.

I think what you find in Jesus, as Paul called him, the icon of the invisible God, well, the God that Paul knew was the God of the Old Testament.

That's the God that shaped his mind and heart.

What he saw in Jesus, what the first Christians saw, was he was the icon, the sort of visible representation of that God.

So is the God of the Old Testament a God of love and mercy, compassion, care for the marginalized?

Yes, and you see all that in Jesus.

Is he also a God of anger and judgment and calling us to righteousness and naming our sin?

Yeah, sure, and you see the same thing in Jesus.

Is he a God who is willing to suffer and give himself for his people?

Yes, in the Old Testament.

And then you see it par excellence in Jesus.

So I would say he's not a different God.

He's the icon of the invisible God, Jesus, as it were, channeling all the different dimensions of the God of Israel.

Now the creed goes on, specifying.

He's the only begotten Son of God.

He's the only begotten Son of God.

Now, I'll get to begotten in a minute, the details on that, but I want to stay just for the moment with the phrase, the Son of God.

Are people throughout the Bible referred to as sons and children of God?

Yeah, you can find it both Old Testament and New.

Those with whom God has a very special familial relationship.

Moreover, are there lots of figures, think from Abraham and Jacob and Moses and Joshua and Samuel and David and Solomon, who are sent by God on mission, chosen and sent?

Yeah, sure, of course.

Well, this Yeshua Mashiach is indeed described as the Son of God, and especially in the Gospel of John, he's described as the one who's been sent by his father.

And you say, well, okay, so far so ordinary.

He's like those figures I just mentioned.

He's like one of the great heroes of the Old Testament.

But then we see, as we look more closely at these texts of the New Testament, that something qualitatively different is going on in regard to this Yeshua Mashiach.

He's not Son of God in just that ordinary generic sense.

He's not just one more figure being sent.

But rather, this Yeshua speaks and acts in the very person of God.

Let me give you some examples.

When Jesus says to the paralyzed man, "My son, your sins are forgiven," well, right away the people react as you'd expect.

Well, who does this man think he is?

Only God can forgive sins.

Right?

That's the point.

Jesus there is doing something that no other figure in the history of Israel would dare to do: to speak and act in the very person of God.

How about this?

In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus almost blithely says, "Well, you've heard it said, but I say."

Well, he's referring to the Torah.

You've heard it said in the Torah, meaning the court of ultimate appeal for a pious Jew.

The Torah was given by God to Moses.

The Torah was the supreme authority.

If you were a rabbi, you'd say, well, I was taught by my teacher who was taught by his teacher and by his teacher back and back and back until we get to the Torah that was given to Moses by God.

It was the supreme authority.

Therefore, to say, well, you've heard it said there, but I say, well, that's to claim a divine authority.

Isn't it remarkable, too, in the Gospels we often hear the people in wonderment saying, well, this one speaks with authority.

That's what they're saying.

He doesn't sound like one of our rabbis, one of our teachers.

He speaks with the very authority of God.

How about this?

Unless you love me more than your mother and father, more than your very life, you're not worthy of me.

Well, I mean, you could maybe imagine a prophet or a religious teacher saying, unless you love God more than your very life.

But we couldn't imagine a prophet or a religious teacher or founder saying, unless you love me more than your very life, you're not worthy of me.

Well, who do you think you are?

The implication, again, is very clear.

Jesus presents himself, not as one teacher among many, but as the very truth itself.

Indeed, doesn't he say in John's Gospel, "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? Of course, you can see in the Gospel of John those wonderful "ego eimi" statements.

"Ego eimi" is Greek for "I am."

I am the bread of life.

I am the good shepherd.

I am the resurrection and the life.

I am the gate, etc. Remember that scene in John when they come to arrest him in the Garden of Gethsemane and they say, we're looking for Jesus of Nazareth.

And in most of our translations, it says something like, I'm the one or I'm he.

What he says magisterially at that moment is, "ego eimi," I am.

And then, of course, everyone in John's rendering of that story, everyone falls to the ground in worship.

Well, see, no one in the first century would have missed this.

"Ego eimi," "ego eimi," calls to mind what I mentioned in the last lecture.

When Moses asked God his name, when the people say, well, what's your name?

What will I tell them?

I am who I am.

"Ego eimi haon" is what the Greek would have said.

And then, of course, in the prologue to John's Gospel, we find this explicit statement: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And that Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the only begotten Son of God.

Yes, not one among many.

Not like the other ones that we might call in a casual sense the Son of God.

But Jesus, who is human, He is this Davidic warrior and Savior, is also "ego eimi."

He's also divine.

Now, the creed continues, specifying this great insight.

The insight, everybody, around which Christianity revolves: if we stop affirming the divinity of Jesus, then Christianity has collapsed.

So, listen as the creed goes on, describing this only begotten Son of God.

Okay.

To unpack this famous statement.

Again, you know, Catholics recite this every single Sunday.

And I wonder how many Catholics really avert to the importance of these words and why the church insists that we say them every Sunday over and again.

Well, to get this, we have to go back now.

I've referred a couple of times to this creed as the Nicene Creed, meaning it comes out of the Council of Nicaea.

This first great ecumenical council of the church took place in the year 325 A.D. Nicaea is a little town near what was called Constantinople in those days, now Istanbul.

The Council of Nicaea was summoned by the Emperor Constantine.

It was bothering Constantine that the very Christianity which he wanted to use to unite his empire was falling into bickering.

How come?

How come?

Because of a priest from Alexandria in Egypt, named Arius.

What was Arius' argument?

Well, like a lot of people around this time, he was trying to figure out how do we make sense of the claims, clear enough in the Gospels, that Jesus is human, but in some sense divine?

There were a lot of very smart people in those centuries trying to make sense of this.

Well, Arius, who was by all accounts a very handsome, charismatic figure, in fact, a singer and a writer of songs, and he would express his theology, they say, in popular songs.

Well, Arius' theory roughly is this: what becomes incarnate in Jesus, this Logos that John talks about, well, isn't God per se, but rather the Logos is the highest creature of God.

The Logos is a very high spiritual creature, reflective of the glory of God, to be sure, but not God.

This very high creature now becomes incarnate in a kind of incomplete human nature, and the Logos completes it by giving it mind, will, and freedom, etc. So that Jesus becomes a kind of hybrid of quasi-divinity, quasi-humanity.

Now, I know that it can all sound rather arcane, but keep in mind, it was attractive to people for a lot of reasons.

First of all, it preserved the simplicity and unity of God.

Remember everything I said in the last lecture about God being simple and actus purus and absolute?

It was bothering some people.

Well, to talk about Father, Son, the Logos is God, and how doesn't that compromise God's unity, etc.?

Well, Arius cleared that up.

There's God, and then there's this high creature, the Logos.

Moreover, at the same time, he appealed to people with a mythological imagination.

Think of ancient peoples that knew stories about Achilles and Hercules and figures that were kind of quasi-divine, quasi-human.

Well, that sounds like what Jesus was.

So you can see why, at that time and place, the Arian theory was attractive.

As I say, he propagated it first in his hometown of Alexandria, and then it began to spread around the eastern Mediterranean, backed up by his popular preaching and indeed his songs.

It reached a point, though, where the Christian church was deeply divided over it.

Many Christians felt, no, Arius is compromising the true divinity of Jesus.

He's denying that Jesus really is God among us.

And so this great debate ensued, which then came to the attention, as I say, of Constantine, who said, we've got to work this thing out.

And so he calls the Council of Nicaea, attended, they speculate, by about 300 bishops.

So a lot of bishops were there.

And they debated this question carefully, and they say with some rancor.

There's a wonderful story, by the way, that St. Nicholas, who stands behind our stories about Santa Claus or Santa Nicklaus, was there.

And indeed, Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor, so not that far from Nicaea, and the dates are right.

He's from the late 3rd, and he dies around the middle of the 4th century, so he could have been there.

But I love the story that St. Nicholas was at Nicaea, and listening to Arius, who was indeed there.

Arius was present at the council, and Arius is laying out his position.

And they say that Nicholas just got madder and madder, until finally he walked across the council floor and slugged him.

A lot of people liked the image.

That's probably a legend, you know.

But it should be true that Santa Claus slugged Arius during the Council of Nicaea.

But what I like about that story, whether it's true or not, is it does express the rancor and the debate.

See, they knew something, everybody, and I want you to know it, that something absolutely decisive was at stake at this council.

If Jesus is not divine, he's a very, very, very high creature, becomes incarnate in him.

But then the whole thing unravels.

And so, the Council of Fathers of Nicaea finally decide that Arius is wrong.

That the Logos that becomes incarnate in Jesus, listen, is God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Those are all anti-Aryan statements.

Nicholas is slugging them.

It's like, one, two, three.

He's God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Don't forget it.

How wonderful, too, how that begins: born of the Father before all ages.

One of Arius' little one-liners was, in regard to the Logos, he said, "There was a time when he was not."

You see what he meant?

Well, no, he's a creature.

God is God.

There's never a time when he is not, right?

He's eternal.

But the Logos, even he's great, he's great.

But there was a time when he was not.

He's not fully divine.

Oh, yeah?

Says Nicaea.

Born of the Father before all ages.

In other words, there was no time when he was not, Arius.

One, two, three, four times it says no, no, no, no to Arianism.

See, and everybody, that's why we repeat this every Sunday.

How wonderful.

This debate from 325 A.D., a long time ago.

But the church recognized then as now.

It's the standing or falling point of Christianity.

Bishop, Christians make claims about Jesus as the Messiah of Israel that Jews do not accept.

How do Christians make sense of their objections?

Yeah, and the objections are reasonable ones.

I've been in dialogue with Jews over the years, and I like when that question comes up.

You know, we don't skirt the great question.

Well, we claim he's the Messiah of Israel; you claim he's not.

And the argument is that the promises have not come true.

So in the messianic age, you hear in the Old Testament that there will be righteousness and justice and God's ways will cover the earth the way the water covers the sea, etc. And they say, look, it hasn't happened.

So say what you want about Jesus; he's not the Messiah as the Old Testament envisioned him.

Well, our answer is something like this.

It's under the rubric of the already and not yet.

With Paul, we'd say, no, all the promises to Israel have come true precisely in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

So in that great act, you see manifested God's intention, God's purpose, etc. Now, the not yet...

that's the age of the church.

So now, under the lordship of Jesus, we are, as a church, making the world more and more in conformity with the divine will, etc. So that's our way of responding to it.

Yes, I know, in a way, where do you see it?

But that's the job of the church, is to instantiate what the resurrection means.

Now, the next phrase, and we've already heard this word, but I promise I get to it, and here we go: begotten, not made.

So we're describing the Logos that becomes incarnate in Jesus.

God from God, light from light.

And we say he's begotten, not made.

Well, now, to explicate this, I want to tell you about another very important figure who was present at the Council of Nicaea.

There was a bishop from Alexandria, of course, Arius' town.

He had the poetic name Alexander of Alexandria.

He was there in the debates.

And with him was a young man called in Greek, Athanasios.

It means, by the way, deathless.

"Thanatos" means death.

So Athanasios is the one that never dies.

It's appropriate.

There's something really deathless about what this man accomplished.

At Nicaea, he was a deacon.

He was a young assistant to Alexander of Alexandria.

But he listened very carefully to the debates at Nicaea.

Soon after the council, Alexander died, and this young Athanasios becomes the bishop.

We know him now as Saint Athanasius, because with tremendous tenacity, he dedicated the rest of his life to a defense of Nicaea.

Now, mind you, Arius and Arianism did not go away right after the council.

They were denounced, but the Arian heresy endured.

Athanasius stood...

The famous phrase often used of him, "contra mundum."

He stood against the world, battling for the truth of Nicaea.

Well, he writes these wonderful texts.

We know them now as the Orations Against the Arians.

And in these texts, he lays out the teaching of Nicaea.

One clarification he makes is that between begetting and making.

It's very simple, but here it is.

Both what is begotten and what is made come forth from another.

So the whole universe has been made, right?

I talked about it in the last lecture.

So everything from the planet Jupiter to archangels to everything in this room, we've all been made.

That means we come forth from the sheer act of being itself, who is the creator God, right?

We're made.

What is begotten, Athanasius clarifies, also comes forth from another.

So the Logos, the Son, comes forth from the Father.

However, here's the decisive difference.

What is made only reflects that from which it comes and does not share perfectly in the being of that from which it comes.

So, I'm a creature.

I've been made.

That means I'm reflective in some way of God's goodness and perfection.

I participate in it, we say, just as everything else in the world participates in the Creator.

But I'm not the Creator.

I don't share perfectly in His being.

But what is begotten, Athanasius clarifies, does fully and perfectly participate in that from which it comes.

God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.

Upon that distinction, Christianity rises or falls.

If Jesus is one more creature among many, even the highest creature, well then, who cares?

But what's in him has been begotten, not made.

And then, kind of as a crescendo in a symphony, comes this word coined at the Council of Nicaea.

It's not a biblical word, not even common in the philosophical tradition: begotten, not made.

And then it says, "homoousios," with the Father.

Now, in Greek, "ousia" means substance, being.

"Homo" means the same.

"Homoousios" with the Father.

We used to say in the older translation, one in being with the Father.

Okay.

Now we say consubstantial with the Father.

That just renders the Latin more exactly.

Latin says "consubstantialis."

And "consubstantialis" just renders "homoousios" in Greek.

I'm giving you that lesson because that word, everybody, is so important to our faith.

Why the church insists we say it every week: God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, homoousios with the Father, one in being with the Father.

Therefore, what is operative in Jesus is God.

And upon this insight, our salvation rests.

Now, what I want to do, and I know I'm going to do it very quickly and therefore inadequately, is to help you understand how this is possible or what this even means to say the Logos is other than the Father, right?

Comes forth from the Father and yet is one in being with the Father.

I'm not quite getting how that's possible.

It sounds like they're totally the same.

What differentiates the Father and the Logos, but in such a way that the Logos remains divine?

Well, to be honest with you, a lot of really smart people after Nicaea wrestled with the same question.

Read John Henry Newman's wonderful book, "The Arians of the Fourth Century," to follow these complex debates.

I think a lot of it came to richest expression in the greatest of the Western church fathers, namely St. Augustine of Hippo.

St. Augustine, wrestling with this very problem, proposes a famous analogy to help us understand these dynamics.

The analogy is drawn from our own psychological experience.

And the warrant for it, the warrant for it is biblical.

The Bible says that we human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God, right?

Well, clearly not in our bodies.

God is not a physical, material reality.

We heard that yesterday.

So therefore, there's something else in us that's in the image of God.

It must be our minds, Augustine said.

But what does he see when he looks within, when he looks at the mind?

What he calls "mens," M-E-N-S in his Latin.

That's the elemental source of all of our intellectual energy.

Mind.

Call it spirit if you want.

Mind is able, Augustine says, to form an image of itself.

I know myself.

I understand myself.

You know, that sounds very abstract, but every day we acknowledge this.

We say, well, what was I thinking yesterday?

I am asking about me.

What was I doing yesterday?

I'm posing myself as an object of my own investigation.

"Mens" gives rise to what Augustine calls "notitia sui," which means self-knowledge.

The mind sees itself in an image.

Having seen itself, it now loves.

"Amor sui," Augustine called it, self-love.

Though we're capable of this, does anybody think that in that process we've split into two beings or into three beings?

No, it's I. I know myself.

Well, says Augustine, here's the best analogy we have for what Nicaea is talking about.

The "mens," the mind, the fundamental energy of God, call that the Father.

The Father is able to propose an interior word.

The Father can form an "imago," an image of Himself, His "notitia sui."

That interior word, that's the Logos that John talks about.

Now watch.

God from God, because that image is a perfect image.

Light from light, true God from true God.

There's no diminution, there's no diminishment.

Begotten, not made.

The image that comes forth from the Father has not been made like a creature.

It comes forth from the Father, but in such a way that it participates perfectly and fully in the "usia" or substance of the Father.

Now, a little bit later I'll talk about the Holy Spirit.

But just to make this point about the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son: difference, but not different in being.

Not making up two separate realities.

Well, that's what's implied in the Council of Nicaea.

And it allows for us to say that what becomes incarnate in Jesus is indeed God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Bishop, all these philosophical distinctions are interesting, but some might wonder what is the relationship between these ideas and the Jesus of the Gospels?

Well, you know, in some ways I would question the premise of that because I don't think the Gospels present like the simple carpenter of Nazareth, teacher of timeless moral truth.

The Gospels are intensely interested in who he is.

They're intensely interested in showing that he's the incarnation of the God of Israel.

Therefore, if you want to put it this way, ontological questions, questions about his being, matter.

And they mattered from the beginning, which is why the church turned to philosophy very early.

Look at Justin the Martyr.

We're talking the second century.

Look at Paul himself.

But then the great councils, you know, come in and they use philosophical language like crazy.

But that's not surprising.

Not a distortion of the gospel.

I'd say it rises very naturally out of the implicit ontological interest of the Gospels in who this Jesus is.

Think of Jesus himself.

He doesn't say, "Hey, what do the people think about my teaching?

Do the people think I'm a convincing guru?".

No, he says, "Who do they say that I am?"

That's the question that preoccupies the gospel writers.

Now, I'm not saying one little thing against his teaching.

It's extremely important, mind you, because of who he is.

So, if he's one teacher among many, I listen to Sufi mystics, and I listen to Hindu sages, and Jewish rabbis, and I listen to Jesus.

Well, okay, okay, they're all kind of, you know...

interesting.

But the way it works for Christians is because of who he is, the incarnate Son of God, therefore I listen to his teaching, right?

So I would question the premise that somehow all this highfalutin philosophy is distorting the simple message.

That's just not reading the Gospels right.

Now, the next article in the Creed, having made these sort of high philosophical clarifications: For us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.

How existential this becomes.

What I mean here is, I know we've been kind of flying high in the conceptual order.

But finally, what this is all about, and it's implicit in his name, isn't it?

What this is all about is our salvation.

Why did the incarnation take place?

That God might heal us.

That he might right a wrong.

He might set something right for us and for our salvation.

He came down from heaven.

Now, don't read "down from heaven" literalistically as though God is up in the sky and has to come down physically.

But it's making a very important point.

The power that comes to us in Jesus does not just rise up from below.

It doesn't come from the ordinary run of humanity.

You say, oh, he's a great teacher, he's a great reformer, he's a great political figure.

Well, okay, we can benefit from those people.

But they can't save us.

They can't save us.

Why?

Because they're in the same mess we are.

I don't care how great a teacher you are, how great a political figure you are.

You're as compromised as I am.

Rather, our salvation has to come from outside of the dysfunction.

It has to enter into the dysfunction.

Yes, indeed, he became one of us.

But he came down from heaven.

It's that wonderful coming together that allows for us to speak of real salvation.

He came low enough to address the problem, but he came from a place outside of the problem, down from heaven.

And then beautifully, "...and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man."

Again, I'm going to bracket the Holy Spirit because I'll get to the Holy Spirit in a later lecture.

So let me focus here on "incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man."

Why is the Creed insisting, of course with its roots in the Bible, on the virginity of Mary, the virginity of the mother of Jesus?

I think here's a first indication.

Mary's virginity indicates as clearly as possible that God is involved in the coming to be of Jesus.

He's truly man, yes indeed.

But the fact that he comes to be without the intervention of a human father shows in a very definitive way that this is the work of God.

Moreover, it shows that what's at stake in Christianity is not just a new fresh teaching, but rather the reworking of creation.

He's the Savior, not just of our moral lives.

He's the Savior of the whole world.

God is affecting something really new right in the heart of nature.

This, too, is communicated by the virginity of Mary.

Something else, I've always loved this.

The church fathers loved it, too.

The Virgin Mary is evocative of the Ark of the Covenant.

You know, in the Old Testament, in this great container, the Israelites placed the Ten Commandments.

It's a sign of the presence of God among them.

Who is the Ark of the Covenant in the fullest possible sense but the Virgin Mary?

Who, in her purity, both physical and spiritual, becomes the receptacle, not just of the tablets of the Ten Commandments, but the receptacle of the Logos, of God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Mary becomes the definitive Ark of the Covenant.

She's also thereby evocative of ancient Israel, which in its totality was a kind of Ark of the Covenant, bearing to the world the Word of God.

Well, that's Mary the Virgin who now bears in the fullest possible sense the Word of God to the world.

All this is summed up in that beautiful, it's the highest praise offered to any human being in the Bible when the angel addresses Mary, "kakaratomene" in the Greek, full of grace.

We use that phrase every time we pray the Hail Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace.

That word sums up everything I've just been saying about Mary, especially in her virginity.

He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.

"Sarco penta" is the Greek word there.

"Sarx" means flesh in Greek.

He became enfleshed of the Virgin Mary.

First of all, notice, everybody, how strange this claim is, both for the Jewish mind and for the Greek mind.

Now, Jews certainly held that God created matter, of course, and there's nothing puritanical about Jewish religion.

God loves matter.

But the creator of the world is not material.

God is spirit, we hear clearly in the Bible.

That God, purely spiritual, would become flesh, would enter into flesh, is counterintuitive, even more so for those shaped by Greek philosophy.

And we heard about that in a previous lecture, didn't we?

God, actus purus, pure spirit, absolute being, essence and existence coincide in him.

The one thing we have to say is there's nothing material about God because matter bears potency.

God, who's actus purus, has no potency.

Therefore, God is not material.

So it wasn't meant to say that he became flesh, right?

The first temptation we should avoid is that we're not talking here about God somehow turning into matter.

So don't forget everything I said in the previous lecture.

All that's true.

That God is purely immaterial.

God is purely actual.

Has no potency.

God doesn't stop being God and now turn into something non-God, turning into something material.

That's not what we mean.

I love in the Council of Chalcedon, which took place about a century after Nicaea, Chalcedon clarifies that the two natures, divine and human in Jesus, come together, but without mixing, mingling, or confusion.

That means that one doesn't turn into the other.

The divinity and humanity remain ontologically distinct.

So what does it mean then to say that the Logos became incarnate?

Here's a way to put it.

The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, God from God, light from light, begotten, not made, takes to himself a human nature, joins to himself a human nature, so as to use it for his iconic purposes.

Think of an icon in Eastern Christian traditions, the icon of a saint, that becomes the means by which we contact that saint.

We see that we're in the icon, the spiritual reality.

Well, Paul refers to Jesus as the icon of the invisible God.

His humanity, and that means his human mind and human will and his human body, his humanity becomes the icon of...

It's in his transfigured humanity that we see and sense the divinity in him.

In that way, we say he became flesh.

He became one of us.

You know, here's an image from the Old Testament that always helps me.

God speaks to Moses out of this burning bush.

The bush is on fire, but not consumed.

God is not a rival to his creation.

In the ancient mythological stories, when the gods enter into the human realm, people are incinerated.

People have to give way because the gods are competitive with us.

But the God of the Bible can light a creature on fire, making it luminous and beautiful, and the creature is not consumed.

The closer God gets, the more beautiful we become, and we're not consumed by God's presence; we're elevated by it.

And so as the Logos takes to himself a human nature, that human nature is rendered luminous and beautiful and compelling.

It's more itself than it would be otherwise.

The non-competitiveness between God and humanity is expressed most fully in the incarnation.

Just one last point I want to make.

I know in this kind of dense section of the Creed dealing with Jesus, what's the upshot of all of this for us?

So we say, okay, I guess all that's true about Jesus.

The fathers of the Eastern Christian world use the word theosis.

Their Latin counterparts in the West translated that word happily as divinizatio, divinization.

The church fathers, both east and west, love to use the phrase, "God became human that humans might become God."

That doesn't mean that we turn into God, but it means God condescended to enter into our humanity, taking to himself a human nature, listen now, so as to save us and heal us so radically that we become not just more morally upright people, more spiritually alert people, but rather we become participants in His divinity.

We become divinized, sons and daughters in the Son.

You see now the full meaning of, "for us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven."

God from God, light from light, enters into our humanity so as to make our humanity luminous with His light.

That's why this section of the Creed, everybody, is of such spiritual significance.

It seems that there are lots of myths and religions that discuss how the gods or God entered into humanity.

I'm thinking of Horus or Mithras.

What's the difference between the incarnation and these myths?

Well, I'd say, first of all, the incarnation is a historical claim.

The fact that Jesus can be identified in a particular period, the fact that we say he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, this identifiable Roman governor of a particular era, the facticity, the historicity of the incarnation differentiates it from all these mythic expressions.

Now mind you, I love the myths.

Mythology is wonderful.

Myths trade in the sort of general truths about life, about humanity, about nature, etc. They're great.

I love the myths.

But the myths always have a sort of "once upon a time" quality, right?

We're not trying to identify now, who was the Roman emperor when Hercules was doing?

Well, no one asked that question because they know he's not a historical figure.

No one wonders now, under what pharaoh was Osiris?

I mean, no one asked that question because the myths are "once upon a time" or bring it up to date, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

That's mythic language, right?

I'm not identifying it historically.

Christianity is deeply interested in the historical particularity of Jesus.

So he's not like just a generic truth.

It's this Jesus.

In him, God took flesh and dwelt among us.

That's the main difference.