Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 38

In the last installment of this series, I said that the primary work of God the Holy Spirit, is to sanctify believers, make them holy, set them apart for God. We said that, this side of the grave, no believer in Jesus Christ is perfectly holy. All Christians are works in progress.

That fact led Martin Luther, the one-time priest and Biblical scholar who inadvertently started what's called The Reformation, to say that believers in Christ are "the Holy Spirit's workshop."

The Apostles' Creed says that the first tools used by the Holy Spirit in the process of sanctification, to facilitate our transformations, are "the holy catholic Church" and "the communion of saints."

The first thing to notice here is that Christian faith is not an individualistic "Jesus and me" proposition. God does care about us as individuals, of course. But we were created to live in a community with God, our neighbors, and all creation. This community God meant to be bound together by love. Not the syrupy, sentimental mush that is often portrayed as love by popular culture, but a tough and unconditional commitment to be the best and do the best for the other.

According to Genesis, the first human beings lived in the community God wants for us. The "self" of Adam and Eve weren't important; they were elevated, enhanced, and defined by their relationships with God, each other, and God's creation. Being part of something bigger and greater didn't diminish them; it lifted them.

Then, all hell broke loose. It happened when the first humans thought to transgress the boundaries God had established for their own well-being.

And what was the first consequence? The two humans, who had previously walked naked, unaware of how their bodies or lives might be misused, hid from God, alienated, afraid that God would see them for what they had become, rebels against the community for which they were made.

When confronted by God, Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. Community was distorted.

God's project ever since then has been, first, to lay the groundwork and then, to create the means by which all humanity could once more be reconciled to God and to others.

It began with the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, God's chosen people to whom God would teach the hard lessons of grace, community, repentance, and renewal, among others, and to whom He would make the promise of a Savior Who would finally and ultimately fulfill Israel's mission to be a light to all nations.

Jesus became that light and through His death and resurrection, made it possible for all people to be reconciled to God, beginning the process of becoming a full partner in God's community of love once again.

Today, when we're baptized, we become part of "the holy catholic Church" and "the communion of saints." We're no longer naked in our sins, alienated from God or others, or ticketed for death. We're welcomed into God's family, covered by grace, and called to love all with the tough-minded commitment with which God has always loved us.

In the Church, we become part of something bigger than "I," yet each individual part is elevated by a sense of self-worth and indispensability. This is what the first century Christian preacher Paul was describing when he wrote, "we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another..." (Romans 12:5).

Paul writes elsewhere:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks*, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)

Notice the words I've italicized above. When we are baptized, we become part of a family of believers, who are nurtured by the Spirit, pulled by the Spirit, and broken by the Spirit, away from our inborn addiction to self and toward community.

That happens in the Church which, the Creed, first of all describes as holy, meaning set apart, and catholic. The word catholic comes from the Greek, literally meaning according to the whole. No matter how many ways we human beings try to slice and dice the Church, all who confess Jesus Christ and receive Holy Baptism and Holy Communion as intended by Christ, are part of one body. We Christians are stuck with each other for eternity.

Church translates the word found in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, ekklesia. This is a compound word meaning, roughly, called out. Christians, not by their own effort but by God's efforts alone, have been called out--or fished out--of the death-bound ways of the world into relationship with Christ, the life-giver, and which, in turn, changes our relationships with others.

The church is "the communion of saints." The word communion, more strictly, means community. The Church is an eternal fellowship that isn't confined to the buildings of brick, wood, or cardboard in which believers may meet in this world. The Church, in fact, is a community of saints, a good Bible word that simply refers to all who trust in Jesus Christ.

All saints are sinners and, in this world, don't get over their penchant for sinning. But saints are forgiven sinners who, day in and day out, turn to the God revealed in Christ, asking for the power to resist temptation and forgive as they've been forgiven, among other things.

The creation and sustenance of "the holy catholic Church" and "the communion of saints" is the work of the Holy Spirit, work the Spirit has been doing for more than two thousand years now.

More tomorrow.

*Here, Paul is referring to everyone who isn't a Jew, Gentiles.

Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 37

I was visiting with a woman recently. Just before I left, she asked me, "What does sanctified mean?"

As I drew a deep breath to answer, she explained why she asked. "Just as my grandmother died years ago, she started singing hymns. My mother said she was sanctified."

Of course, I had no way of knowing what her mother meant when she used the term. Different Christian traditions use sanctify in different ways.

But, at its simplest, the word sanctify, which comes to English from the Latin language, means to make holy, that is, to be transformed to live in sync with the holiness of God.

Just as we have nothing to do with creating ourselves or our world, which is the work of God the Creator (Father), and nothing to do with becoming free of sin and death, which is the work of God the Redeemer (Jesus Christ, the Son), sanctification is the work of God the Holy Spirit.

Sanctification is a "now" phenomenon in the lives of believers in Christ. That makes the Spirit's work different from that of the Father or the Son. God has already made or created us. Christ has already died and risen for us. Those are accomplished facts. But becoming part of God's set-part family, trusting in and growing in our faith in Christ, and living eternally as part of God's forever kingdom is a process that unfolds in this world and is brought to completion in eternity.

It's a process full of fits, starts, sputters, stops, and restarts, in spite of our deepest desires to be the good people God made us to be and we want to be. (See here.) The old self that trusted itself rather than Christ reasserts itself all the time and must be battled daily through repentance and submission to Christ. No Christian on this side of the grave is fully sanctified, fully set apart for God and God's will for human beings.

C.S. Lewis well illustrates how we can be both holy, set apart from God, yet not fully sanctified, in his Chronicles of Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There, a boy named Eustace Scrubb, described by his cousin as a "rotten stinker," falls prey to his greedy, selfish nature and becomes, on a mysterious island, a dragon.

In this state, Eustace realizes how horrible he has been and how much he wants not to be separated from others. After some days, Aslan, the lion who is a Christ-figure in Lewis' stories, violently releases Eustace from his layers of dragon skin, reducing him (or elevating him, as the case may be) to his better self, the self he wanted to be and, in his self-delusion, imagined himself to be even when he was a "rotten stinker."

But then, Lewis writes this:

It would be nice, and fairly true, to say that "from that time forth Eustace was a different boy." To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

When, by the power of God's Spirit, we, who want mostly to believe in ourselves or in what we can see, control, or manipulate, come to faith in Christ, we are in relationship with Christ. Salvation is ours. But the cure for all that separates people from God and from other people, has only begun.

When we turn to the Bible, we notice that "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). But we also notice that though the direction of believers' lives are changed, they're far from perfect. Paul, the great evangelist of first-century Christianity, could be capable of petulance, keeping record of perceived wrongs, and an unwillingness to "let bygones be bygones."

For example, Paul once got into a major disagreement with his one-time mentor in the faith, a man whose nickname, Barnabbas, meant son of encouragement. The two were planning on going together on a missionary journey. Instead, Paul and Barnabbas decided to go their separate ways after an argument over Barnabbas' desire to take a younger believer with them, someone Paul felt had let them down on a previous mission. Barnabbas was willing to give the younger man a second chance; Paul wasn't, at least not then. (Read about it here.)

Yet, nobody familiar with the arc of Paul's life, from a rabid opponent of Christian faith willing to see the first followers of Jesus martyred or excommunicated from the Jewish faith into a loving, self-sacrificing teacher of the good news of new life for all who believe in Christ, would say that Paul was unchanged by the grace God gives in Christ. Paul was in a state of becoming, a new creation who, throughout a life of prayer and study and service in Christ's Name, was being sanctified, made holy, set apart as a child of God.

That process of becoming, of sanctification, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It's like the backwoods Christian, about whom I first read in Bruce Larson's book A Call to Holy Living, who said, "I ain't what I was and I ain't what I'm going to be. But thank God I ain't what I was."

The work of the Holy Spirit is sanctification. In the next installment, I hope to address how the Spirit does that.

Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 36

Yesterday's installment in this series elicited this comment from Elizabeth Mahlou:

Any reason you chose this creed instead of the Nicene Creed? I think the latter probably describes the Holy Spirit a little more. (I tend to prefer the Nicene Creed, but that is indeed a personal preference.) Thanks for the thoughts on interpretation.

I love the Nicene Creed and, in fact, we use it as opposed to the Apostles' Creed when we celebrate Holy Communion at Saint Matthew. (We regularly celebrate Communion on the first and third Sundays of every month and on festival days of the Church Year. Many Lutheran congregations now have Holy Communion every Sunday as well as on festival days.)

Elizabeth Mahlou is right in saying that the Nicene Creed is more extensive in its description of the work of the Holy Spirit. All three of its articles, each, like the Apostles' Creed, dealing with a Person of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are lengthier than the articles of the Apostles' Creed.

But there are several reasons I'm using the Apostles' Creed as a framework for exploring what the Bible teaches and the Church confesses when it comes to understanding the three Persons of God.

First: The Apostles' Creed is probably more widely known than the other Christian creeds. One day about thirty years ago, I was channel-surfing when I ran across Pat Robertson, a person for whose theology I have no particular liking, talking about the Apostles' Creed. That struck me as interesting because as a sort of charismatic Baptist, Robertson doesn't come from the historic mainstream Christian tradition where, for centuries, the Apostles' Creed has functioned as a kind of altar call, inviting new believers and old believers to confess their faith in the God ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus Christ.

Robertson, as I recall, portrayed the Apostles' Creed as a normative statement of Christian faith, something to which every Christian could easily subscribe. I think that he was right. (By the way, you may want to make note of the date because this may be the only time I have ever said that Robertson was right about something. See here and here.)

Robertson's use of the Apostles' Creed is testimony to how well known it is.

(It should be said though, that while the Apostles' Creed is probably the most widely known of the creeds, the Nicene is the one more widely accepted by more different Christian faith traditions.)

Second: The Apostles' Creed is the oldest of the three ecumenical creeds of the Church. (The verbose Athanasian Creed is rarely used, except when pastors want to torture their congregants or sometimes, as Holy Trinity Sunday tradition.)

Unlike most other creeds or the confessions of faith from different Christian bodies, the Apostles' Creed wasn't composed by a council brought together to resolve some theological dispute. It's a simple statement of faith rooted in the teachings of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. (The Athanasian Creed, dating back to the fifth or sixth century AD, was not evidently spawned by a controversy. But its length keeps it from widespread use, I think.) Most confessional documents in my Lutheran tradition were composed for the purpose of resolving differences of opinion, including The Augsburg Confession, The Apology to the Augsburg Confession, The Smalcald Articles, and the Formula of Concord. More recently, the Barmen Declaration, composed by the eminent theologian Karl Barth, was a statement of Christian faith in opposition to the perversion of Biblical faith advanced by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement.

Although called the Apostles' Creed, the idea, first committed to paper by Rufinus in the fourth-century, that it was composed by the apostles of Jesus on the first Pentecost, is fanciful.

But the Creed is clearly rooted in the teachings of the apostles, all of it traceable to the Gospels and parts of which were already being used by second- and third-century Christians.

Third: The biggest reason for using the Apostles' Creed as the framework here is that I began this series using Martin Luther's Small Catechism as the roadmap. (A catechism is a short document, written in question-and-asnwer form, explaining the Christian faith or a particular tradition's understanding of the Christian faith. Luther, who lived from 1483 to 1546, wrote two catechisms. The Small Catechism, first published in 1529, was designed to help families review the basics of faith at the dinner table. Generations of Lutherans have used it as a framework for preparing young people to affirm their Baptism and publicly declare their intention to live for Jesus Christ in their adult lives. The Large Catechism, which Luther wrote shortly after the smaller document, was presented for the instruction of priests, who Luther found alarmingly ignorant of the Bible's revelation of God.)

The Small Catechism has six principle parts and a discussion of the Apostles' Creed is one of them.

While Luther and the Lutheran movement see the other two creeds among the foundational confessional documents that faithfully present the truths of the Bible, the simplicity and directness of the Apostles' Creed and its freedom from concern with specific theological controversies, making it very different from the Nicene Creed, probably explain why it has played so important a role in our confession of faith and in explanations of our faith.

Back to looking at the Holy Spirit tomorrow, I hope.

Read the Apostles' Creed
Read the Nicene Creed.
Read the Athanasian Creed.

By the way, here is what we ELCA Lutherans claim to believe about the faith. This confession of faith appears in the Constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 35

Etc. That abbreviation of the phrase et cetera, meaning roughly, and so forth, falls at the ends of sentences and phrases. It's a multipurposed-word that stands in place of tedious catloging of items you don't want to bother listing. There's not much romance in etc., but it does cut to the chase.

When I first became acquainted with the Apostles' Creed, one of the three historical confessions of faith that, historically, all Christians have embraced, the cohesiveness of its first two articles was clear enough. The first article, confessing faith in God the Father, Who created heaven and earth, made sense to me. The second article, discussing God the Son, Jesus Christ, seemed to clearly state Who Jesus is and what He has done for us.

But then came the third article:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen

It seemed to me that after sensibly using the first two articles to describe God the Father and God the Son, the originators of the Creed wanted to do the same thing about God the Holy Spirit, but after confessing belief in the Spirit, gave up on doing any describing. Everything after, "I believe in the Holy Spirit" seemed like a catalog of other stuff Christians believed in that might just as well have been covered by etc.

But, over time, I've come to see that I was wrong. The second through sixth lines of this article each describe an action of the Holy Spirit in the same way in which the lines of the first two articles describe the Father and the Son. It's God the Holy Spirit Who makes the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Of course, Christians worship one God in three Persons. This is a mystery I've looked at earlier in this series. And there is an interpenetration of the roles of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. But this list I once thought could be skipped over with etc., briefly sums up what God the Spirit is up to now and will do for all who believe in Jesus Christ in the future. It's not a list of attributes of the Spirit, but a witness of what God has revealed of the Spirit.

I hope to begin unpacking that confession in the next installment of this series.

Resurrection...of an old blogging series

Three years ago, I began writing a series of blog posts on the basics of Christian faith. It got to 33 (actually, 32) installments. Then the installments stalled and I didn't complete the series. But the other day, I decided to pick it back up again. So, as to get you up to speed, here are links to the first posts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14 (Oops...there was no Part 14)
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29

Part 30
Part 31
Part 32
Part 33

Part 34

I hope to publish Part 35 in the next few days.