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Overview
Doctrinal preaching has fallen on hard times in recent years. Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles' Creed seeks to stimulate renewed interest in — and provide useful models of — Christian proclamation that is truly rooted in the central tenets of the faith. Using the Apostles' Creed as a template for doctrinal, confessional preaching, this book draws together an ecumenical cast of respected biblical scholars and preachers who explain the creed and demonstrate its preaching possibilities. Each of the book's fifteen chapters consists of an essay that explores and illuminates one of the creed's articles of faith, followed by a scintillating sermon that models how that article can be preached as good news today.
Contributors:"Walter R. Bouman
Richard A. Burridge
Philip W. Butin
Gabriel Fackre
David F. Ford
Colin Gunton
Richard B. Hays
Craig C. Hill
Scott E. Hoezee
Leslie J. Hoppe
George Hunsinger
Scott Black Johnston
James F. Kay
Richard A. Lischer
Thomas G. Long
Lois Malcolm
Daniel L. Migliore
Richard A. Norris Jr.
Steven D. Paulson
Cornelius Plantinga
Cynthia L. Rigby
Fleming Rutledge
William M. Shand III
Marguerite Shuster
Wm. C. Turner
Robert Louis Wilken
Ralph C. Wood
Susan K. Wood
Frances M. Young
Robin Darling Young"
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802821201 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2004 |
| Pages: | 317 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
EXPLORING AND PROCLAIMING The Apostles' Creed
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-2120-0
Chapter One
The Triune GodCredo in deum patrem, in Iesum Christum, et in Spiritum sanctum
MARGUERITE SHUSTER
When one first glances at the Apostles' Creed, one may be struck by the fact that the Creed, like the Bible itself, does not mention by name a doctrine so absolutely central and crucial to the Christian faith as the Trinity. Yet a second glance in each case reveals something quite different from this seeming oversight, for the structure of the Creed, like the structure of biblical revelation itself, is trinitarian in form. The Creed moves from Father to Son to Spirit; God's self-revelation moves from the God who made himself known by name to Moses, to Christmas, to Pentecost. And because Christians believe that revelation would not be revelation if who God is did not correspond to who he shows himself to be, they believe that from all eternity a fundamental threeness as well as an essential oneness characterize the one they worship as the sole Lord of heaven and earth.
Thus, while no Christian wishes to be understood as other than monotheistic in her faith, there is something at least partially misleading in lumping Christianity together with Judaism and Islam under some such rubric as "the great monotheistic faiths," without further ado. Indeed, it is precisely what makes Christianity Christian - affirmation of the full deity of Jesus Christ (and of the Holy Spirit as a distinct member of the Trinity) - that these other great religions reject. Likewise, groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, who do not affirm these things, are not generally recognized as Christian. Even when Mormons, say, use a trinitarian baptismal formula, their baptism is not recognized by most churches as Christian baptism because they do not mean by the words what the Christian church has meant. It is not only a form of words but a particular, carefully defined content that is critical to Christian identity. Christian faith is trinitarian faith.
Biblical Sources
In Scripture we find no "doctrine" of the Trinity, but we do find the materials that necessitated the development of the doctrine. A particularly significant point is that the preferred designation of the early Christians for Jesus was not his own favorite phrase, "Son of Man," but rather "Lord," the Greek translation of the tetragrammaton, Yahweh, the sacred name of the Old Testament - a name identified with God himself. Not only did early Christians use this form of address in ways that involved worship, appropriate to God alone (especially prominently in John 20:28, Thomas's confession, "My Lord and my God"; but also in prayers, hymns, and christological benedictions), but they applied to Jesus Old Testament passages clearly referring to God, for instance, Philippians 2:9-11 (Isa. 45:23), Romans 10:11 (Isa. 28:16), and Romans 10:13 (Joel 2:32). Lordship is likewise affirmed of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17). How can such practice of worship and use of language possibly be made to mesh with the Shema (Deut. 6:4), the great affirmation of God's oneness cited by Jesus himself (Mark 12:29)?
It would seem clear that an incipient, unarticulated trinitarianism deeply shapes the thought and expression of the writers of the New Testament, including their understanding and appropriation of the Old Testament. That is, they knew, even if they did not say it in so many words, that it was the one God, and no other, who met them in Jesus Christ and whose Spirit, poured out upon them, enabled them to live in newness of life. Thus, right from the beginning of the Gospel narratives, we find all three persons of the Trinity represented, in the annunciation (Luke 1:35), and in the stories of the baptism of Jesus in all four Gospels (Matt. 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22; John 1:31-34). During his earthly ministry Jesus referred to the Father as uniquely related to him (e.g., Luke 10:22; John 5:18) and to the Spirit as the one by whom he worked (Matt. 12:28). In John's Gospel come particularly strong affirmations of the unity of Father and Son (John 10:30; 14:9), as well as of Jesus' sending of the Spirit (14:16-17; 16:6-15). And of course, there is the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19, as clear a trinitarian formulation as can be found in the New Testament. This statement is remarkable not least because the name of the three persons into which the convert is to be baptized is a singular name, yet the designation of each person is preceded by an article: singularity and plurality are held firmly together.
When we turn to the Pauline and deutero-Pauline epistles, we find the same sort of consciousness, and not only in the great trinitarian benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:13, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you" (in which "God," strikingly, is listed not first but second). Paul uses language like "God," "God the Father," "Son of God," "our Lord Jesus Christ," "Spirit," "Holy Spirit" constantly and in such a way that the terms are by no means interchangeable (even though Christ and Spirit occasionally seem to merge).He prays to Jesus (2 Cor. 12:8). He says the Spirit of God is related to God as the human spirit is related to a human being (1 Cor. 2:11). In Colossians 1:19 we are told that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ. But the depth of the trinitarian flavor of the texts cannot be seen in single verses alone. The number of longer passages in which the work of all the persons of the Trinity is represented (particularly as regards salvation) is impressive: see, to take but a sample, Romans 8:3-4, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 1:4-7; 2:4-5; 6:11; 12:4-6; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; Galatians 4:4-6; Ephesians 1:3-14; 4:4-6; 1 Thessalonians 1:2-6; 2 Thessalonians 2:13. Similar threefold references also appear in non-Pauline epistles, as in 1 Peter 1:2 and Jude 20-21. The New Testament writers could not say what they needed to say without frequent reference to Father, Son, and Spirit, in ways that give virtually equal dignity to each.
What, though, about the Old Testament? To say that the Old Testament contains no such evidence of the Trinity as we find in the New Testament would seem simply to state the obvious, especially as we have identified knowledge of the Trinity with the events of salvation history. Nonetheless, Christians continue to believe that in Old Testament and in New, we deal with the same God; and the writers of the New Testament clearly read the Old with the assumption that Christ was to be found in it - even if later exegetes have struggled with meager success to discern where Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, might have looked to expound, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets... the things about himself in all the scriptures" (Luke 24:27). Certainly we no longer presume to see the Trinity every time we find three of anything; but conversely, interpreting the plurals of Genesis 1 simply as "plurals of majesty" that presume singularity of subject is a strategy that has fallen on rather hard times, on the grounds that such usage was not in fact characteristic of the Hebrews. At the very least, that the commonly used Hebrew term for God, Elohim, is a plural form is surprising for a rigidly monotheistic people. Similarly, even if one does not wish to go as far as Barth in identifying the divine image with humankind being male and female, that there is this plurality and hint of relationship in the image is suggestive.
Other possible adumbrations include the appearances of the Angel of the Lord, a being who seems separate from God and yet evokes a response that goes beyond that produced by an ordinary messenger, bringing a sense of the divine presence itself (see, for instance, Gen. 16:7-14; 18:1-19; 22:11; Exod. 3:1-15; Num. 22:22-35; Judg. 13:20-22, among many others). Some have seen in such appearances, as well as in other Old Testament theophanies, the presence of the preincarnate Christ, or at least a prefiguring of the incarnation. Some have referred to the personification of a preexistent Wisdom, particularly in Proverbs 8, as consonant with the preexistent Logos of John 1 (though one must be cautious to observe that preexistence as such does not necessarily entail divinity). And of course, there is the messianic strand of the Old Testament as represented in Psalms 45:6-7 and 110:1, both of which make a distinction between God and God or Lord and Lord, interpreted in Hebrews 1:8 and Matthew 22:41-45, respectively, as a distinction between the Father and the Son. None of these is likely to be persuasive to one not reading with Christian spectacles on, yet early Jewish Christians who were wearing such spectacles found in such texts a way to affirm the fundamental continuity of their religious convictions and experience.
Historical Sketch
It took several hundred years - until the final form of what we now refer to as the Nicene Creed (more precisely the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, framed in Constantinople, 381), with further "fine tuning" in the so-called Athanasian Creed (fifth century) - for the incipient trinitarianism of the Scriptures and of early Christian faith and worship to reach the developed form in which it has long been universally accepted by Christians. The formal doctrine, to state briefly its technical terms, is that God is one in his essential being (ousia - substance, nature, or essence) but subsists eternally in three persons (hypostases), Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten by the Father; and the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father (and the Son). This logical order of Father, Son, Spirit is the source of the language of first, second, and third persons of the Trinity; but it must be emphasized that this is a logical order, not a temporal order or an order of comparative dignity, for all the persons are coequal and coeternal.
The working out of the details took time. However, once the church had to face squarely the seeming contradiction between strict monotheism and the fact that Christians worshiped Jesus - particularly in the challenge of Arius, who taught that the Son was not coeternal and coequal with the Father, but was the first and best of the creatures - extension of the christological principles articulated at the Council of Nicea (325) to the Holy Spirit followed with a sort of necessity of internal logic. Just as orthodox understanding of the person of Christ involved not only his full divinity but also rejection of Adoptionistic and Docetic heresies, so understanding of the Trinity involved not only affirming the full divinity of the Holy Spirit as well, but also steering somehow between tritheism (three Gods) and modalism (also called Sabellianism: the one God appearing in different modes at different times, often understood sequentially - first as Father, then as Son, now as Spirit). Significantly to oversimplify a complex picture, attention to "threeness" has traditionally been associated with the Eastern Church, particularly the Cappadocian Fathers, while emphasis on "oneness" has been associated with the Western or Latin tradition, particularly with Augustine, leading respectively to "social" versus "psychological" or "individual" or "Latin" trinitarian models. These are, however, to be seen as matters of weight and emphasis, not of fundamental doctrinal disparity: the church as a whole affirms one God in three persons, and affirms that just how this can be is a mystery in a strict sense, inscrutable to the human mind. Until recent challenges we shall mention briefly below, this orthodox formulation has stood the test of time, apart from objections taking shape in the various forms of Unitarianism that have cropped up since the time of the Reformation.
While the technical language of trinitarian theology is unlikely to prove edifying in the preaching ministry of the church, certain points nonetheless bear comment, in order that the language of preaching might remain sufficiently precise so as not inadvertently to betray fundamentals of the doctrine of the Trinity. One of these is the importance of the terms "beget" about the Son and "proceed" about the Spirit. As C. S. Lewis observed, one "begets" something fundamentally like oneself (and similarly for what proceeds from oneself), while one "creates" or "makes" something unlike oneself. Use of such language seeks to protect the substantial oneness of God. Reference to "substantial" oneness provokes the caution that when thinking of "substance" in trinitarian discussion, it is better not to picture some sort of quasi-material "God stuff" that the persons of the Trinity share or is parceled out among them, but rather simply what makes all the persons God, as when one speaks of the substance of an argument. Another fruitful way of speaking, developed by the late seventh- to early eighth-century theologian John of Damascus, is that of the perichoresis (Greek; Latin, circumincession; English, "co-inherence"), or mutual indwelling, of the divine persons. We do well to picture Father, Son, and Spirit not, as it were, in a line (which evokes tritheism), but rather inside one another (as suggested by Jesus' words in John 10:38; 14:8-11). Although that figure might sound paradoxical, we get a hint of what is entailed when we think of two people who love each other so deeply that their concerns, perceptions, and interests interpenetrate one another such that they can in no way be separated, much less set at odds; yet these persons would say they are in no way lessened but rather more themselves because of this relationship. This idea was particularly important in the East because it protected the equality as well as the unity of the persons; and equality had been somewhat at risk because of the Eastern Church's emphasis on the monarchy of the Father. Since the Father is one way or another the "fount" of the Trinity, subordination of the other divine persons to the Father has always been a tendency, especially given biblical language that affirms in particular the subordination of the Son to the Father (e.g., John 14:28; Phil. 2; 1 Cor. 15:27-28). Such passages have, however, traditionally been referred to the Son as incarnate, not in his essential deity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EXPLORING AND PROCLAIMING The Apostles' Creed Copyright © 2004 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| Foreword | ix | |
| Preface | xii | |
| Contributors | xiv | |
| 1 | The Triune God | 1 |
| Credo in deum patrem, in Iesum Christum, et in Spiritum sanctum | ||
| A Sermon: The Triune God Who Seeks and Finds Us | 13 | |
| 2 | I Believe in God, the Father Almighty | 20 |
| Credo in deum patrem omnipotentem | ||
| A Sermon: The Almighty God | 33 | |
| 3 | Creator of Heaven and Earth | 38 |
| Creatorem coeli et terrae | ||
| A Sermon: The End in the Beginning | 49 | |
| 4 | And in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord | 55 |
| Et in Iesum Christum, filium eius unicum, dominum nostrum | ||
| A Sermon for Advent: I Believe in Jesus Christ, God's Only Son, Our Lord | 73 | |
| 5 | Conceived by the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary | 79 |
| Qui conceptus est de Spiritu sancto, natus ex Maria virgine | ||
| A Sermon: A Christmas Eve Sermon | 93 | |
| 6 | He Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was Crucified, Died, and Was Buried | 99 |
| Passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus | ||
| A Sermon: The Call of the Crucified | 111 | |
| 7 | He Descended into Hell | 117 |
| Descendit ad inferna | ||
| A Good Friday Sermon: Harrowing | 130 | |
| 8 | The Third Day He Rose Again from the Dead | 136 |
| Tertia die resurrexit a mortuis | ||
| An Easter Sermon: The Third Day He Rose Again from the Dead | 154 | |
| 9 | He Ascended into Heaven and Is Seated at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty | 161 |
| Ascendit ad coelos, sedet ad dexteram dei patris omnipotentis | ||
| A Sermon: God Has Gone Up with a Shout! | 173 | |
| 10 | From There He Will Come to Judge the Living and the Dead | 178 |
| Inde venturus est iudicare vivus et mortuos | ||
| A Sermon: From There He Will Come to Judge the Living and the Dead | 191 | |
| 11 | I Believe in the Holy Spirit | 197 |
| Credo in Spiritum sanctum | ||
| A Sermon: I Believe in the Holy Spirit | 212 | |
| 12 | The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints | 219 |
| Sanctam ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem | ||
| A Sermon: The Dream Church | 233 | |
| 13 | The Forgiveness of Sins | 240 |
| Remissionem peccatorum | ||
| A Sermon: Reviving Forgiveness | 254 | |
| 14 | The Resurrection of the Body | 260 |
| Carnis resurrectionem | ||
| A Sermon: The Resurrection of the Body | 273 | |
| 15 | The Life Everlasting | 279 |
| Et vitam aeternam | ||
| A Sermon: The Life Everlasting | 292 |