Today we will look at the first affirmation of the Apostles’
Creed. It starts with: “I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth”.
The first affirmation of the Creed has to do with the central importance of God
the Father. Now we ask why the affirmation in God the Father, why is that there
“I believe in God the Father,” why is this word occur in the Creed.
Long before the Council of Nicaea which came in the fourth
century, the Christian Community was self-consciously trinitarian. The Creed
progresses “I believe in God the father and in Jesus Christ his only son our
Lord” and then you have a separate affirmation “I believe in the Holy Ghost” so
that all three persons of the Trinity are confessed in this very early Creed of
statement. So the allusion to the Father on the one hand is loaded with
trinitarian significance and I will come back to that in a moment but there is
another reason why the term “Father” figures prominently in the foundations to
the Christian faith.
In the 19th century where we saw the advent of 19th century
liberalism, it was kind of an ongoing attempt with the birth of the science of
comparative religions, for example, to seek the essence of religion, what is it
that Christianity has in common with Islam, with Judaism or Buddhism and so on
and those who were disenchanted with the supernatural trappings of biblical
Christianity wanted to penetrate to the core of the Christian faith or to what
the thinkers called “the essence of Christianity”. Ton of books published in
the 19th century talk about the essence of Christianity. Harnack,
for example, in the 19th century published a book entitled “what is
Christianity”. He boils Christianity down to two central affirmations: universal
fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of men.
Can you think of any place where the Bible teaches the
universal fatherhood of God? It's an inference that can be drawn from creation and
the apostle Paul, on one occasion, does say: “we are all God's Offspring” in
the sense that God is the creator of all people there is this bleak sense in
which the Bible does inferencely say that God is the creator all men and that in
a certain sense he is the Father of all men. But that is a very rare indication
and you would think that if it's the essence of Christianity that is something
to be virtually on every page. The second phrase is “the universal Brotherhood
of Men”. Where we read that in the Bible? The Bible does not teach the
universal Brotherhood of men. What the Bible teaches is the universal
neighborhood of men. Jesus makes it clear that all men are my neighbors and I
have duties to perform to my neighbors that I'm called to love my neighbor as
much as I love myself.
In the New Testament, the concept of brotherhood is a very special
kind of human fellowship. The heart of Christian confession we will see in a
moment is that Jesus is the only Son of God. So there is a unique sense in
which Jesus which is the Son of God which is a unique sense in which God is the
Father of Jesus. And we enter into the family of God not by nature, not simply
by being born a human being. The Bible says we are children of wrath so in
order to become a child of God we must be adopted into the Father's family by
virtue of our relationship with the only begotten Son who is Jesus. The
scripture says those who are led by the spirit of God, those are the sons of
God or the children of God.
In biblical language, particularly in Jewish categories, there
is a special niche associated with this filial relationship of fatherhood and
sonship and, consequently of brotherhood. We are adopted into the family of God
by virtue of faith in Christ and through the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. If
we talk about a universal brotherhood, universal fatherhood, we obscure that
very special relationship that Christ has made possible for those who believe in
him. In the Old Testament there are times when God is referred to as “the
father” that nowhere in the Old Testament or in any existing Hebrew documents
do we ever find a Jewish person addressing God directly in the form of personal
address as “father” until the 10th Century AD, 1000 years after Christ in Italy,
with one notable exception a Jewish Rabbi From Galilee in the first century,
whose life is recorded in history, many of his public and private prayers are
recorded in an every single prayer this Rabbi praise except one He directly addresses
God as “father.” It is Jesus. Jesus’ contemporaries were shocked to their boots,
that Jesus would walk around calling God “Father”. Some of his enemies took
that as grounds enough to convict Him of blasphemy.
We can notice that 90% or more of Christians will begin
their prayer by saying “father”. It is so universal among us today, so common
place, that we tend to take it for granted and miss the radical significance of
Jesus addressing God as his Father. We also missed the significance of the
Lord's Prayer at that point. Jesus said “when you pray, pray like this: Our
Father”. Jesus is saying what I have done, I am the first Jew who have done it,
I have done something radical, a major innovation and now I am inviting you to
participate in that personal filial relationship I have with the Father. You can
address Him as Father too. Jesus is inviting us to say to him: “Abba Father”. So
there is the sense in which the Father refers to the Trinity and the other
dimension of it which we do not want to miss is the filial relationship that is
special and which is personal. Christianity affirms the existence of a personal
God with whom we have a personal and filial relationship.
This is so elementary that is often overlooked that the God
we worship is a God who has a name and who has a personal history. If we say: do
you believe in some kind of Supreme Being? that is one thing, that is one kind
of question, the other question is do you believe in God the Father? that is a
personal God. Do you believe in Yahweh? A God who has a name and who has a personal
history. That's all the difference in the world. All of the adjectives in descriptive
terms that is used for God in the Old Testament and in later Creeds, eternal,
invisible immutable omniscient and so on, when we go to the very basic confession
of the Apostles’ Creed, we see that God is described again in the earliest
Roman symbol as: “I believe in God the Father Almighty”. I wonder why it is
that that one is selected for the earliest formulation: “God the Father
Almighty”. Remember in the patriarchal period in the Old Testament, in the
ancient traditions of Israel God was known by several names and by several
titles. The Supreme name of course Yahweh: I am who I am. But he also was known
by other names: Elohim, for example, and one and it was very important in
Antiquity was the name El Shaddai. Again we find in the Patriarchs in the time
of Abraham and throughout the Book of Job which is set in the period of the
Patriarchs, in the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And this title or name for
God means “the one who overpowers,” “the one who has all strength and power”. Now
here in the ancient world there is a sense in which the term Almighty calls
attention to monotheism. Why would the term Almighty be a confession of
monotheism? critical scholars in the 19th century developed was called the Religious Historical School” and
they applied a scientific principle that was widespread and very influential to
the culture in western civilization 19th century with the concept of evolution.
So often people think that the debate between Christianity and secular science
focuses on biological issues about Evolution but in the 19th century in the
intellectual world evolution become a base word. It wasn't restricted to
questions of biological development but all sorts of evolutionary theories
developing. Coming out of the massively complex philosophical system of
Friedrich Hegel, for example, we see it in Spencer social Darwinism his view of
political theory in government and so on. And it also was applied to religions
and the basic thesis was this that everything all patterns of Life all forms of
culture all aspects of society whether their biological psychological the
governmental economic or whatever it is, everything follows the same pattern and
upward movement of the nature of things from the simple growing up to the
complex. And the theory was the same thing happened with the development of
religion. So that all religion began with very simple ideas of God and the
theory was this: religion begins with animism and then progresses to polytheism
and then progresses to henotheism and then progresses to monotheism. So the
theory is monotheism the belief in one God is something that comes from very late
in the history of the world and the critics even said that it is late in Jewish
history doesn't come until the 8th and 7th Century prophets of Israel. They don't
believe that Moses was a monotheist, they don't believe that Abraham was a
monotheist and so on. They say rather it went to the same progression.
What's an animism? Where do you find animism today? in
primitive tribal societies. Animism believes that inanimate objects like trees
and rocks, and so on, are inhabited by spirit beings usually of a negative
inclination, demonic spirits, so all of
nature is animated so you pray to the stone you pray to the tree afraid of the moon
that's the most primitive form and then, it graduates to more sophisticated
level, you have a belief in many gods like you've had in the ancient world
where you have in each nation a separate god with a separate job description
for some specific tasks: you have the god of war you have the god of fertility
you have the god of Hearth and Home you have the god of wisdom you have the god
of strength the god of speed and all they have different gods, the Greek gods, the
Roman gods God for everything.
Then you move from
polytheism to henotheism. What is henotheism? Henotheism is some sort of
transitional stage between polytheism and monotheism. Henotheism teaches the
idea that there is one god for every nation who has sovereignty over a
geographical or ethnic sphere. So the Jews has one God who takes care of
everything, fertility, wisdom … But He is just the God if the Jews. And next
door, the Philistines have their god. The idea is that there is one god for one
people until, finally, there emerges the concept of a God who is Almighty, the
God who is over every thing.
From the earliest times in Hebrew religion which disputes
this evolutionary process is the idea of monotheism because not only do we find
in the patriarchal records the name of God as El Shaddai, the Almighty One but
you have the concept of God as the Creator not just the Redeemer of Israel, but
the One who create heaven and earth, not just over the geographical boundaries
of Palestine that run from Dan to Beersheba but they go over the whole world so
that the term Almighty is rooted and grounded in the concept of God as being
Sovereign over all the world. It is a clear affirmation of monotheism.
I mentioned earlier, I asked the question: do you believe in
God the Father Almighty? The old Roman symbol simply said: “I believe in God
the Father Almighty. And in Jesus Christ his son… There was no Clause “maker of
heaven and Earth”. That came in presumably in the second century. We talked
already about the crisis of the second century that made it necessary for the
church to even have Creeds because of the influence of Gnosticism and we
remember one of the most important reasons why the church declared its Canon of
the scripture, the Bible, it was because of the work of Marcion, the very first
collection of New Testament books was done by Marcion but he was a heretic.
What was is his heresy? what did he do with the New Testament writings? He
produced a truncated, expurgated version of the New Testament. Matthew's Gospel
was gone, and any reference to the God of the Old Testament was scratched out. So
that he tried to create a line of division between Jesus and the Old Testament
God. Do you still find that tendency today? That people say “Jesus I like but
the God of the Old Testament that I can't stand”. The Gnostics in the second
century argued, some of them argued that Jesus Father was the true God but it
was not the Creator. It was in that stage that the church inserted in its Creed
“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth” to dispute
this idea of a distinction between the God who is and the Creator the Father of
Jesus Christ according to Christianity is the creator of Heaven and Earth. Our
Redemption is brought about by the activity of our Creator and there is only
one God no demiurge and there is no disjunction between the God of the New
Testament and the God of the old Testament.