broken eikon

So I was reading the Presbyterian book of confessions today. I came across the confession of 1967, and I have to say… I was blown away. In 1967, the Presbos adopted this confession of faith as a response to “racial discrimination, nationalistic arrogance, and family and class conflict”.  It was very responsive to biblical scholarship and  asks the church to read scripture with literary and historical context in mind. There are many really really cool parts, but this really stuck out to me is line 9.45, containing the following words…, “this search (for reconciliation and peace) requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security, to reduce areas of strife and to broaden international understanding… Although nations may serve God’s purposes in history, the church which identifies the sovereignty of any one nation or any one way of life with the cause of God denies the lordship of Christ and betrays his calling”.

“Even at risk to national security”?

Can anyone find me another statement of faith that states that nations should pursue reconciliation even at their own risk? That sounds too much like Christ for me…

And that last part about identifying any one nation or way of life with God’s will means denying the Lordship of Christ. Dang.

love it…

John 10:7 says Jesus is the door. As we all know, doors are made from wood. So Jesus, if you take the Bible as God’s word, is made of wood. Now, here is the freaky part. According to the church councils of the 4th century, Jesus is the same substance as God. Therefore, follow me here… God is made of wood. Now to take it to a whole other level. The Holy Spirit, according to those same councils, is the same substance as the Father and Christ. Now…ready?… The Spirit is the same word in Hebrew for breath. Therefore, Jesus=door=wood=God=wood=Spirit=wood=Spirit=breath. Jesus had to breath. Jesus was a breath cannibal. He breathed in himself, which was wood. And since we know humans don’t breathe wood, Jesus was not human.

Thank you for indulging me on this particular piece of stupidity.

Over here at Brian McLaren’s blog, he posted about a conference he was attending this weekend. Check it out. This line however struck me as very very very encouraging (and if you have been in Bible study with me at all or heard me preach, you know why this excites me):

Speaking about the priorities that revelealed themselves in the emerging movement of Christianty, his first priority was this:

“1. A fresh vision of Jesus, rooted in the canonical gospels rather than in later theological debates. This fresh vision of Jesus and the kingdom of God brings a new perspective on Paul and the whole Bible as well.”

All I can say is right freakin’ on.

Michelle asked me to unpack what I meant when I scribbled down, “why did church fathers insist that Jesus could not save that which he did not embody (or assume)? would it matter if our definition of being saved changes?”. So here goes.

There were a number of controversies in the early church concerning who Jesus was. Mind you, the earliest church was more comfortable with the mystery of Jesus. By the time of the councils, we were more obsessed with classifying and putting everything in neat little boxes. Two major controversies concerned Arius and Appolinarius. Keep in mind that both men were strong faithful Christian brothers, but were condemned as heretics because they were on the wrong side of a vote. First, Arius (a  christian priest) was teaching, along with many others, that Christ was not of the same substance (homousian) with God. He taught that Christ, although firstborn of all creation and was used by God to create everything, was still created by God. The councils condemned him and adopted the unwavering stance that Christ was homousian (of one substance) with the Father and that the both were co-eternal with each other.

Next came Apollinarius, a bishop of the church, who actually was one of the principle fighters against Arius. He wanted to say that Jesus was so much God that he really didn’t have a human soul. In other words, God was here in Jesus, and Jesus had what seemed to be a human body, but everything inside was God. This too was condemned by the councils, in large part due to Gregory of Nazianzen, another bishop who said this, “That which is not assumed is not healed”. What he meant by that is that if God did not take on every part of our nature, then he could not have saved every part of our nature. In other words, God has to become everything he wants to save, and redeem it by his life and death, in order for it to be possible for us to adopt that salvation. So if God came down in a human body, then only our body could be saved. If he came only in spirit, then our bodies would still be unsavable.

Many scholars want to take issue with what Gregory said because if it is taken to its logical conclusion, then some say women, non-Jews, those in old age, etc… can’t be saved because Jesus  didn’t assume thier forms either.

What I was asking with my pondering was why did Gregory think this, and why was it such a powerful argument when he used it against Appolinarius?  Also, the idea of salvation that they had in mind was an eternal damnation kind, but what if our standard definition for salvation becomes more broad? Does that change what Gregory was saying?

What I will have to do to answer those questions is review Gregory’s works and check out the arguments from the councils in depth.