“We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried. The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will never end.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. He proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. He spoke through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and to life in the world to come. Amen.”
Our translation of the Nicene Creed, which we just read together, has 218 words in it. Fifty-three of those are related to the virgin birth and incarnation. That’s twenty-four percent. That percentage is quite high. It is particularly high when you consider that the creed covers the death of Christ in thirteen words; that’s thirteen for the crucifixion compared with fifty-three having to do with our Advent study.
The Nicene Creed spends so much time on matters relating to the virgin birth because the Roman emperor himself convened a church council to come up with a statement on the divinity and humanity of Jesus. He did so because churches were quite divided over these matters. Now if it seems strange that a Roman emperor would convene a council to handle this, just consider the turmoil of our culture right now because we lack an agreed upon definition of gender. Perhaps those authorities understood something about culture that we don’t. The council met in the city of Nicea from May to August in the year 325; this Nicene Creed was the result.
The Nicene Creed spends more time on matters relating to the virgin birth than the Apostles’ Creed because of its purpose, but the Apostles’ Creed, which is simply a summary of the apostles’ teaching, devotes eleven percent of its words to the virgin birth. The Athanasian Creed—the third and final creed to which we as a church subscribe—is from one perspective almost entirely devoted to trying to figure out the virgin birth and incarnation. So this doctrine of the virgin birth, which might have seemed like an odd choice for an Advent study, was and is far more important than we assume. We will study this in two points. First: delineating the truth. Second: affirming the miraculous.
First: delineating the truth. It is hard to say exactly what you mean. Think back to your last disagreement. Maybe it was with a coworker. Maybe it was with a loved one. Did you say everything you wanted to say precisely as you wanted to say it? Probably not. We humans rarely say what we want to say in the way we want to say it. You might think that listening and speaking are easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy because you do them every day, but to do them well takes a lifetime of practice.
The council of Nicea met for three months because it is so very difficult to put truth into words. Truth must be delineated precisely because we humans are so very prone to misunderstand. Again, think back to your last disagreement. My guess is that any number of misunderstandings led up to that disagreement, misunderstandings were at play during that disagreement, and there is real possibility that misunderstandings have arisen regarding that disagreement. We are very prone to misunderstand, which is why creeds are formulated the way that they are. The statement, “the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father,” might seem unnecessarily wordy, but it isn’t. Each line was meant to delineate exactly what the Bible says and guard against misunderstanding.
Last week in our evening study we saw a common misunderstanding about the human-divine nature of Jesus. We called it El Camino Jesus. We tend to think of Jesus as divine and human in the way that an El Camino is a car and a truck, meaning we tend to think of Jesus as a blending of the human and divine in the way that an El Camino is a blending of a car and a truck; it isn’t really a car and it isn’t really a truck and we tend to think of Jesus as less human than us and less divine than the Father. This wreaks all sorts of havoc with our thinking. We start to assume that Jesus doesn’t really get what it is like to be in our shoes. We blurt out statements like, “what do you expect me to be—Jesus?” We start to think of him as totally unsympathetic to what we are in the middle of when, in fact, the truth is, as Hebrews puts it, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” We think of Jesus as the friendly member of the trinity and the Father as the unfriendly one. Now we don’t see that error until we examine it. We don’t even know that we are misunderstanding until we have the truth delineated for us, which is why creeds delinate the truth and why they matter today.
Now the council of Nicea had its work cut out for it because the churches were rife with misunderstanding. Members with a Jewish background had a hard time wrapping their minds around Jesus’ divinity. There was the Ebionite heresy, which stated that Jesus was a perfect person who justified himself by obeying the law. He serves as an example to us but nothing more. They focused on Scriptures that talked about Jesus keeping the law. Other Jewish members believed that Jesus was a mere human who was so righteous that God adopted him as His son. Take, for example, Jesus baptism; ‘as soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”’ That is an echo of Psalm 2:7, “I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father.” Those members would say, ‘see, it says, “today I have become your father.” Jesus wasn’t God’s Son until that day.’ Those people were reading the same Bible, but they were understanding it differently… and wrongly.
The members with a Jewish background had a hard time wrapping their minds around Jesus’ divinity. The members with a Greco-Roman background had a hard time wrapping their minds around Jesus’ humanity. To them the idea of God taking on flesh seemed not only impossible but repugnant. There was the heresy known as Docetism, from the Greek word meaning “to seem”, which says that Jesus was God but only seemed to be a human. He only seemed to be hungry because God can’t get hungry and Jesus was fully God. He didn’t experience any real temptation in the wilderness because God can’t be tempted, and Jesus was fully God.
This creed was an attempt not to satisfy the Jews and Greeks but to delineate the truth in such a way that was true to Scripture without leaving wiggle room for misunderstandings on any side.
They spent so much time focusing on the virgin birth because this was the process of the incarnation. This was the way by which the second person of the Trinity became as human as you while still being as divine as the Father. There are only two Scriptures that deal with that the virgin birth in depth and we’ve studied them both, but the incarnation, which came about as a result of the virgin birth, is all over the New Testament and if you read the New Testament this year, you saw it all over the place. We Christians need to read our Bibles. Over the past sixty years, American Christians have taken pride in being part of Bible-believing churches while at the same time giving up on Bible reading. It’s a slide toward disaster which we are trying to interrupt by reading the New Testament this past year and the Old Testament over the next two years.
Now perhaps by now you are convinced that the creeds delineate the truth, but you want to know what they did delineate. What do they tell us about Jesus? What do they tell us about the incarnation and virgin birth? Well, we don’t have time to say it all this morning, but we do have time for three statements.
First, they make clear that salvation must come from the Lord. We humans are so helpless and hopeless by nature that God needed to become one of us to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. That’s part of what’s going on when we said, “for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven…” The incarnation and virgin birth show you that any attempt at self-help with ultimate matters on your part will get you nowhere. You know that. You’ve tried; so have I. We need God to rescue us and the virgin birth shows how he entered this world to do so.
Second, the creeds safeguard Jesus’ divinity in such a way that you come to see God in a whole new way. The incarnation teaches you that when you see Jesus on the cross, you aren’t only seeing how God saved you from your sin; you are also seeing something about the character of God that you wouldn’t see as fully otherwise. You learn something new about the patience of God when you watch Jesus interacting with people like you. You learn something about the compassion of God when you see Jesus’ heart go out to the crowds. You can see God there because, as the creeds put it, Jesus is, “of the same essence as the Father.”
Third, the creeds formulate Jesus’ nature in such a way that you know that to see him is to see what humanity ought to be and, therefore, what you ought to be. Look how he loves. Listen to how he thinks about death. Listen to him reflect on life. Watch him with his friends. Watch him with the authorities. This is what it means to be truly human, which is what deep down each of us wants—to be truly human. This is what we will study on Christmas day.
So the creeds delineate the truth of doctrine. They have also served to highlight the miraculous nature of it, which is our second point: affirming the miraculous. The gospels aren’t stories in which fishermen see a man calm the wind and waves and go on with business as usual. They are records of history in which fishermen see a man calm the wind and waves and say, “What kind of man is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” which is exactly the sort of statement we would make in that same boat. The gospels affirm the miraculous without assuming the miraculous to be normal. Myths and legends assume the miraculous to be normal. People don’t bat an eye in those stories when a king is revealed to be a more creature snake or a noble warrior is transformed into an eagle. The gospels are very different. They treat miracles with surprise and astonishment, as if they really happened in the real world because they did.
The inclusion of the virgin birth in the creeds acknowledges that the miraculous is part of the gospel story. Now in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the virgin birth was highly debated because many people—for a variety of reasons—grew ashamed of the miraculous. They demythologized the Bible. If you want a theological word to toss around at your Christmas parties, try that one on for size: demythologize. It means to remove the elements which are out of step with secular thought. To demythologize is to neuter the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, as well as matters such as angels, demons, and heaven and hell, which we are studying in the evening.
At the turn of the twentieth century, people were seeking to demythologize the virgin birth. This made this doctrine something of a warzone for the battle over the miraculous. Whether or not a man affirmed the virgin birth became a touchstone of whether or not he was a liberal or a fundamentalist. This is why fundamentalists made it one of their five fundamentals. We have our own such touchstones on a host of issues today, some fair and some unfair.
Now since the virgin birth is part of the historic creeds of the church, the demythologizers didn’t remove it. They reinterpreted it; when they say the creed and say, “he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,” they consider themselves to be affirming something of the divine in us all. They do something similar to the phrase, “on the third day he rose again.
Ask yourself though, do you think that the authors of the Nicene Creed hoped that church-going people might one day repeat their formulations without actually affirming any of it? No, they met three months because they believed that something remarkable had happened in human history and they wanted to delineate and affirm that truth so that people could expressed what they did believe: “For us and for our salvation… Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father… came down from heaven; became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made human.”
The question for you is, ‘do you actually believe that?’ It’s not difficult for you to recite a creed. If you can read aloud, you can do that. The question is whether or not you believe what you said before this sermon. The question is whether or not you can say what Rich Mullins said in his song about the Apostles’ Creed, “And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it; no, it is making me. It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.” Amen.