Intent

In this post, I intend to provide information helpful to seekers like me who’ve had reservations about the Nicene Creed and whether or not Jesus is truly begotten by and of the same substance as God the Father.  For over 50 years, I have said the Nicene Creed but parts of it have not made sense.  As of Christmas Eve 2023, they do make sense which blessing, a Christmas Gift – after all the 12^th day of Christmas is January 5th – I hope to share in a manner that it can be received.

It should be noted at the outset that I am a seeker and autodidactic scholar.  I have no credentials to teach, am not a seminary student or graduate, and am not a priest or preacher, albeit I deeply respect those who do have such credentials.  Mine has been the dangerous path of questioning everything which, if one is not very careful, admits the adversary (Hebrew: ha-satan).  I’ve tried to avoid that by including N. T. Wright’s “Of Christian Origins and the question of god [sic]” series (of tomes) in my study, as well as works by other Abrahamic scholars, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim and the advice of mentors who are priests and credentialled pastors.

Confirmed as a Methodist in my youth, going to an Episcopal school for grades 6-12, and later being confirmed as an Episcopalian in 2009, I think that the words we say are very important, and my views, while consistent with the High and Broad church, are very charismatic or Holy Spirit filled.  A bishop once told me that the church had three basic congregations – High and Lazy, Broad and Hazy, and Low and Crazy.  While I love the high church, I’m a crazy low church kind of guy although I’ve not darkened a church door for quite some time now.

In the low church, and, in truth, in all churches and throughout the world, there are people, many people, who have experiences with our mysterious triune God.  In some cases, such an experience can be quite like the ending of the Gospel of Mark 16:1-8 (16:9-20 appear to be a later addition).  The women coming to the tomb finding it empty except for a young man clad in white telling them Christ is risen.  (16:8) “And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”

Women, you see, in my life, have tended to be a bit quicker on the uptake, a bit sharper, than men, yes even me.  I suppose it didn’t take these women long to realize that the resurrection of Christ Jesus meant that He was truly God’s Anointed, the Messiah, and even, somehow, God himself.  What He’d told them was true.

So, too, with many who are touched by God.  We want to deny what happened because it shakes us up to think that all of this mumbo-jumbo might actually be true not to mention the eagerness of some to attribute every odd thing to either a psychotic break or a demon.

Jesus foresaw this problem, as we find in John 20:26:31, the story of doubting Thomas.  In verses 28 and 29, we read ‘And Thomas answered and said unto him, “My Lord and my God.”  Jesus saith unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”’

My intentions are to help remove stumbling blocks, facilitate questions you may ask your preacher or priest, and to serve truth which is part of The Way of my Lord.

Introduction

Context and Aristotelian Apologetic

The Nicene creed’s origins will be discussed below.  In this section, I’m building the context for what learned people thought at the time during which the creed was written.

Both Aristotle (b. 384 BCE, d. 322 BCE)  and Plato (b. ca. 428. d. ca. 348 BCE) were well known by the time of early Christianity.  Philo of Alexandria (b. ca. 20 BCE, d. ca. 50 CE), a Jewish scholar and contemporary of Jesus (b. ca. 4 BCE, d. ca. 33 CE in His pre-resurrection ministry), attempts to reconcile Scripture to Platonic philosophy in his work just as Maimonides (b. 1138, d. 1204), in his “guide to the perplexed”, attempts to do the same with Aristotle.  Plato’s version of God, the demiurge or craftsman, takes what already exists and puts it into forms that become everything we see and experience.  Aristotle goes further, much further, and posits that there must be something eternal, a first cause, and that first cause is God.  While he does not advocate for ex nihilo (from nothing) creation, neither does he completely reject the concept.

It is very important to understand that physics was a part of philosophy in these times, and that while “religo” smacked of superstition, philosophy included the divine and eternal powers.  Physics always has a way of ending up in philosophical debate, for instance, our current Lambda-CDM cosmology model that goes from the big bang forward depends on Dark Energy (Lambda) and Dark Matter (CDM is cold dark matter).  That being the case, we should know that Dark Energy and Dark Matter “have not yet been discovered”, they are a speculation, a hypothesis, a plausible fantasy, that makes the model work.  Physicists ponder the multiverse, multiple universes simultaneously in existence with Stephen Hawking having been a proponent.   We posit that other universes may be so completely different than our own that we may not be able to prove or disprove their existence because the constants we know in terms of the Higgs field and Gravity and so forth are, well, bizarre meaning that it doesn’t take much of a change before what we know as space-time-matter-energy doesn’t exist.  Cosmology has always led to and been partnered with Philosophy, let’s not kid ourselves.

People tend to discount Aristotelian physics as passé and even silly, however, I can tell you that Aristotle  writes of what we’d call the big bang, and that it was he, not René Descartes who first opined “I think therefore I am”.  Further, the atomists of the time, discounted by Aristotle and Maimonides, were very close to the basics of matter that we now use.  Their primary error was that all atoms, in their theory, were the same whereas we know that they differ (as in the periodic table).  Maimonides lampoons this theory because of the fact that color is attributed to the atoms whereas grinding up a green crystal results in white power – they didn’t yet understand, but it was the refraction and or absortion of light that produced the color.  He also lampoons the idea that a line of atoms, if the atoms are an odd number, cannot be bisected because the central atom cannot be split.  Well, the atomists were right in a wrong sort of way because they go too far in making time also quantized in atomic increments and insisting that the world exists in stop frame animation where new creation occurs at the expiration of each time atom.  In that model, God is very, very busy.

So, in the temporal context of the creed, there are elements – earth, water, fire, air – in the sublunary realm (the Moon was on the celestial sphere closest to earth in earth centered cosmology), and the supralunar element, Aether which is the stuff of the stars and is somehow eternal and not subject to life and death.  Things on earth are combinations of elements creating substances that are then placed in a form (which is an eternal form) making a thing – an animal, mineral, vegetable, and so forth.  Things that live had souls “anima” in Latin, one being the basic spark of life, ka in Ancient Egypt (starting in the old Kingdom, not later than 2800 BCE), one facilitating motion, and one unique to man which is the intellect.  In Ancient Egypt these two are combined into the Ba, the personality.   Aristotle, in “de anima” arrives at his conclusions independently of Ancient Egyptian thought, most likely, but it should be of some interest that the basic concepts are nearly 5,000 years old.

Thus, Plato and Aristotle are both interested in what things are made of and whence they came.  Plato doesn’t get to the logical regression that Aristotle builds (from Plato’s work) but, rather stays interested in how elements produce what we know and finds that forms, especially geometric forms, are eternal.  Thus, in Plato’s model, the cause of the universe is a craftsman god, the demiurge, coming along and doing his best to build from what was already there by placing things into forms.  Aristotle struggles through the concept of infinity and rejects the notion that time had been infinite to this point (that is, that a was caused by b which was caused by c and so on ad infinitum).  He settles on something being outside of time and being the first cause of all things.  We should note that neither Plato nor Aristotle were proponents of Ex Nihilo (from nothing) creation which is a common tenant of all three Abrahamic Faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  The point here being that the substance of God is not the substance of things on earth.

I realize that this is a bit of a head scratcher given how we use the words substance and form and cause, but we need to understand some basics to understand what the creed is meant to tell us.  For instance, Duncan MacDougal published an article in 1907 claiming to have measured the weight of the soul at 21 grams.  That was of course refuted and debunked, however, if we follow the logical procession of Aristotle through to Einstein, with Energy (E) equals mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared, E=m*c_squared, we also see the m=E/c_squared which is the more useful term.  In other words, it’s not that mass is converted to energy, no, it is that mass is a measure of net energy.  Therefore, any substance is, in a broad view, energy, but it takes a lot of energy to have a measurable mass.  It is energy that can neither be created nor destroyed, which brings us back full circle to the Lambda-CDM cosmology model.

My point here is that there is certainly room for God albeit others reject that notion, and many first hand experiences demonstrate this to me, but of course they cannot be repeated, which is to say that my opinion is colored by my life experiences.

The best models are simple yet get in all of the observed data.  In my life as a Chief Engineer, people like to throw out data points that are way outside of the rest because they make the models more complicated.  These are known as outliers or fliers in analysis.  I don’t allow throwing out points without an explanation of what assumptions are being made for each individual point cast out.  Our data points here are scripture.

The Base Model

People love to argue, especially people from the Abrahamic faiths, but even modern physicists and engineers of all faiths, and no religious faith, love to argue with different sets of data or different data points included for various reasons, alternate facts if you will.  Perhaps Seneca the Younger should have said Arguendum Humanum Est (to argue is human) rather than Errare Humanum Est (to Err is Human), but the rest of the phrase, sed perseverare diabolicum (but to persist is diabolical) should stand, methinks.

In order to facilitate argumentation, and improvement, a base model is necessary.  This becomes the foundational element of teaching until or unless it is changed by force of argument supported by data.  This is true even in theology where argument and debate centers on interpretation of texts and what they may mean in a more holistic or even gestalt sense, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole as it were. 

With the birth of the Christian faith, arguments were far flung especially given that Christian literature, including the Gospel accounts themselves, were initially quite sparse or even being written.  The destruction of Jerusalem during the first Jewish Revolt (66-70 CE) didn’t help matters because this splintered what existed at that time and very early on (the death and resurrection of my Lord is generally put ca. 33 CE).  The Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE) destroyed even more, and Emperor Hadrian in his anger slew thousands upon thousands of scholars in the region of Judea including what little remained from 70 CE of Jerusalem.

Thus while the church had Martyrs a plenty under Nero (under whom that first revolt began), many people of strong faith and many, many experiences with the Holy Spirit, there was very little set down to guide people on what to believe about this God, and we should note that Christianity was spreading very quickly in areas far away from Judea and among peoples who were not Jewish and therefore had neither exposure to Jewish thinking nor precedent for understanding the Jewish God.

Earliest major dissent was the work of Valentinus (b. ca. 100, d. ca. 180) who developed a Gnostic view of Christianity (cf. Nag Hammadi Library).   Gnosticism is extraordinarily complex but depends on progressive revelation of secret knowledge (Gnosis means knowledge) in order to be saved, and the cosmology involved in simply too complex to elaborate here but essentially tells us that the god we read of in the Hebrew Bible was a mistake made by Wisdom in trying to perform a creation of her own. Note that Sophia is the Greek word for Wisdom as in Philo-Sophia = Philosophy = the love of wisdom, and in Gnosticism Sophia is generally a goddess.  

Thus enters the god of little g and God of big G.  The big G God is ineffable and cannot be approached except by Jesus and Sophia, and those with secret knowledge.  The little g god, and there are several is the evil, ignorant, demiurge who thinks he is God but is really god.  This god is the result of Sophia’s botched attempt at creation that resulted in the earth within this “Aeon”.  There are more divine beings and Aeons (essentially universes) than one can shake a stick at.  Others with what we’d call more traditional views did everything they could to erase Gnosticism, but, alas, it is still with us in many forms usually called conspiracy theories but also in certain religions.

None of that works with a monotheistic religion or scripture, albeit the Gospel according to John is proto-gnostic inasmuch as it views Christ Jesus as the Word made flesh which in and of itself leads some to believe that God the Father never revealed his word to any minds in the Old Testament but, rather, that it was Jesus.  This is detailed at length in the 2008 Orthodox Study Bible which I have studied partially as a means to study the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, ca. 200 BCE) which is used in that bible.

As time progressed, and Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire in 313 by Emperor Constantine (b. 272, d. 337), views continued to differ, particularly in Arius’ (b. 256, d. 336) view of the relationship between Jesus and the Father.  Constantine called the first Council of Nicaea in 325, resulting in a creed that was later modified in 381 at the Second Ecumenical Council resulting in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed.   In the 381 version, the Holy Spirit whose existence and belief were attested to in 325 was refined to state that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, “and from the son” being “filioque” in Latin, hence the name “filioque clause” given to the controversy.  This led to the first major schism in the church as Greek Orthodoxy did not accept this addition, although John 20:21-23 clearly states that Jesus breathed on the Apostles and told them to receive the Holy Spirit (Pneuma Hagion – lit.  Holy Breath). 

From my memory, particularly from the music of the Rejoice Mass, here is the creed:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty – Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord the only begotten son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds.  God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontus Pilate.  He suffered and was buried.  And the third day He rose again, according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and He will come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.  His kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son and together with Them is worshiped and glorified.  He spake by the prophets.  And I believe in one holy catholic and Apostolic church, I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sin, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.  Amen.

This, then, is the base model.  It does not tell us what Christians are to do, or how we interpret the scriptures except in the basics of the faith in terms of the Godhead, the mysterious Christian triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit as you wish).

My Stumbling Block

A slogan used by some Episcopalians, including me is “you don’t have to check your brain at the door”.  That being the case, I’ve long struggled to understand how the Father could “beget” the Son (Jesus) and how Jesus could be God in the flesh.  After all, I’ve been taught hundreds of times that Jesus is 100% man and 100% God, but that never made sense to me, until Christmas Eve 2023 that is, while studying Maimonides.

Begotten and Substance

The first thing we have to understand is the meaning of “beget” and “begotten”.  This does not necessarily mean sexual reproduction but can also mean “give rise to” or “bring about”.  The second thing we have to understand is that “substance”, in the context and time of the Creed, was a combination of Earth, Wind, Fire, Air, and, usually alone and associated with eternal things, Aether.

We also need to understand is that God is not a corporeal entity, some blob of stuff.  We think of Him as that because the more abstract concept of Aether, of Spirit, is difficult for us, and even then, we think of spirits as being here or there.  In a way, God is everywhere and while many laugh at Aristotle’s comment “nature abhors a vacuum”, that’s actually in tune with the Lambda-CDM model.  There is something everywhere, we just haven’t discovered it yet.  A vacuum is not air pressure, it is an absence of anything which, in our model, means it’s outside of the universe itself.  Not bad for a man like Aristotle 2320 years ago, I’d say – Alexander the Great had a fabulous tutor it would seem.

So, what I think we are to understand is that, before willing the cosmos into existence, God willed that part of His substance gave rise to  (begot) the Son, and Both will that part of Their substance be the Holy Spirit.  That’s why, methinks, the “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father” part of the creed is there.  Furthermore, this unique substance is what allows Jesus to be flesh and God.  In essence, the soul of Jesus is the substance of God while the flesh is that of a mortal man, until the resurrection.  True, we don’t know how a woman can have a male offspring without fertilization (virgin birth of females is possible but extraordinarily rare).  But that’s a miracle I can accept rather than God having some genetic code.

There is a wee clue to this in the creed itself, where we say “and I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of Life”.  At the time of the creed’s writing, and for thousands of years prior, it was a common assumption that everyone knew that a spark of life emanated from the divine for all creatures, great and small and, in Aristotle, also for plants.  This is, at a minimum, the ka of ancient Egypt.  The Ba, too, is an element of the divine but is not God.  Except for Jesus whose soul is the very substance of God, methinks.

The Trinity

The best treatment I’ve heard regarding the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, one God in three persons), was delivered by a Roman Catholic Priest at a high Latin mass.  He told us, in English thanks be to God, that the Trinity was a mystery of faith, something that we could not solve, and anything we came up with to solve it, to think about this curious relationship was wrong to start with.  For my part, and following where I’ve gone, because they are the same eternal substance, they are the same except for what’s different which is their person.  We often think of the person as a personality, as a different face we show in different situations, but this is unitarian and not orthodox Christian doctrine.  No, these three persons are independent yet in complete agreement through their strange connection that makes them one yet also three distinct individuals.  It is a mystery.

Many, many Christians seek to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit.  That’s part of what raising hands is about, about being open to the Shekinah of the Lord’s presence.  And, yes, I’ve had those experiences and I can tell you that the first thing that happens to me is I start weeping a joyful weeping.

Summation

The creed serves the purpose of creating boundary, viz. ‘Cursed is he who moves his neighbor’s boundary mark.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ (Deuteronomy 27:17). Indeed, throughout Jewish history, this and the commandment in Deuteronomy 19:14 have been interpreted to mean that tradition and the readings of sages must not change.  However, if one does not wish to check one’s brain at the door, scripture cannot be considered literal and inerrant.  As we learn more, we must re-evaluate our interpretations and what the text (a) was originally meant to convey and (b) reveals in light of the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Study of Maimonides shone light on my errant interpretation of the Nicene Creed and allowed me to progress and regain the gusto I once had in affirming my faith with those words.  My use of his work would likely irritate Maimonides who does away with the notion that Jesus is God just about as quickly as does the Qur’an “God needs no helpers”.  That notwithstanding, my understanding of the creed now aligns with my understanding of scripture and of my experiences with the Almighty.  In that last part, those experiences, it is essential to note that they are because I am far from perfect, not because I am righteous or of any special nature.  St. Paul is right to say “In my weakness is His strength.”

Ancient Egypt

I have briefly mentioned the Ba and Ka of Ancient Egypt in this post.  What I have not thus far done is explain the relevance of this concept to Judaism or Christianity.

If we study Ancient Egyptian literature, especially the long Hymn to Aton (aka Aten) we find a link, a literary dependence of which direction we cannot tell between Psalm 104 and Egyptian literature going back not later than 1320 BCE.  There is a strong link between Egypt and our faith, like it or not. 

If we study the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, and the Coffin Texts we note the prominence of the weighing of the heart (ca. 2860 BCE), which is the earliest seeds of the Word (Semina Verbi) I’ve found.  You see, upon death the soul of the Egyptian ruler, and later the common person, was subject to a trial of the weight of their heart meaning their deeds in life against the weight of the feather of Ma’at symbolizing doing the right thing, being just, being equitable, helping others, and so forth.  Those with hearts that balanced or weighed less than the feather were admitted to the afterlife whereupon their ba and ka were joined into an immortal being, the akh.  The soul, the personality or ba, of those who failed was immediately consumed by Ammit, devourer of souls.

Vignettes in the book of the dead and on pyramid walls depict a balance scale being used to weigh the hart against the feather of Ma’at, usually with Thoth in attendance since, in Egyptian mythology, he created writing and he’s taking notes.

In the Cecile B. DeMille film, “The Ten Commandments”, which purported sources I have read finding no clue as to how this fanciful plot was devised, there is a scene where Charlton Heston (Moses) has refused to return from building a city for Pharoah for an audience with Pharoah (requested at Yul Brenner’s, Pharoah’s biological son’s goading of course).  The Pharoah and Yul confront Moses, especially for giving the Hebrew slaves one day in seven to rest.  During the conversation, Yul has placed weights on a balance scale causing it to tip due to the “bad” deeds of Moses.  Charlton Heston responds by holding up a brick and saying that a city is built on bricks, the living make many, the sick make few, and the dead make none whereupon he puts the brick on the scale and tips it to his direction strongly and loudly.

Jesus is that brick in our favor, He tips the scale of Ma’at to admit us if we believe in Him.

By the way, Ammit is a goddess, so it is possible that the phrase adapted from William Congreve’s 1697 play the Mourning Bride “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is mild.  In the weighing of the heart, Hell IS the fury of a woman scorned.

Spirituality

The creed and other boundaries are important for us to understand where danger lies.  Our post-modern world is filled with people who embrace spirituality but not any orthodoxy.  I’ve had a lot of experiences, perhaps some day I’ll post my testimony, and they have humbled me because I know I am not deserving.  I have also felt the pull of things that are not at all good, and rejected them quite quickly.  If we fail to understand the basics of Abrahamic faiths and, in this case, Christianity, we may fall prey to spiritual elements that seek our downfall, the adversary, the Evil one.  I mean if we take scripture as data for our model, there are indeed demons, spirits of the air as the Greeks put it – daemons.  Why this is we can debate but cannot know.  That they exist we can know, and that we must reject their influence we must learn.

Therefore, should you be foolish enough to be on a quest like mine, the quest of holistic study and questioning everything, be warned to respect the adversary and not allow yourself to be drawn in to dark thinking.  That’s the real purpose of the creed.

On that note, one other small piece of advice.  The Cross is a Christian symbol.  Right side up, it reminds us of many things associated with the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus.  Upside down it reminds us of the Martyrdom of St. Peter who, according to tradition, was thusly crucified because he felt unworthy to be crucified as was our Lord: The Romans, no doubt bored, obliged him.  On its side, the cross reminds us of our Lord’s admonition to pick up our crosses and follow Him.  The Cross is always a Christian symbol.

Conclusion

I sincerely hope that I’ve helped more than I’ve hurt. 

Issues of faith are deeply personal, yet in the very bookish Jewish and Christian cultures, literature and what it says is very important in developing the basic bulwark of our God for us to consider as we contemplate the Divine. 

That said, I hope we all conclude that the incarnation of Christ Jesus resolves the problem of the great shift in biblical text (cf. Kugel “The Great Shift”) whereby mankind becomes progressively more distant from God’s initial closeness in Genesis throughout the text, until He again walks among us in the New Testament.  Distance seems to be what mankind wants, not what God wants, and for all of our grandiose ideas we may miss this essential portion of Christianity and how the Eucharist (communion) keeps us part of Christ and directly so.

So if you read the creed and find it building a barrier between you and the Divine, I suggest you reconsider exactly what the incarnation, cross, and resurrection mean to all of us and to you, personally.  Our God lives, He is among us in many ways even now as you read this.  Of that much, I have no doubt whatsoever.