Video for September 12th, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
I’ve had to step out for a few days to France for personal reasons, so I’m recording this from my mother’s house overlooking the local village of St. Pardoux la Riviere. Such a high vantage point affords lovely views across the valley.
In medieval cosmology being up here would mean we were closer to God. The up and down metaphor still has an enduring appeal. Faith in God is of course a presumption of the Bible. Psalm 14 verse 1 is quite explicit, “the fool says in his heart there is no God.” But what is God like? This is something the creeds have tried to tie down since the New Testament was written in the first century. Regular worshippers will be familiar with the Apostles Creed which we say at morning and evening prayer on Sundays. Most scholars reckon the Apostle’s creed as we have it, was written in southern Gaul in the 5th century. It is an evolution of the older Roman creed which was shorter and had its roots in the great commission of Matthew 28. This original was based on a second century rule of faith and quoted by the Church Fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus in the one hundreds. From the earliest times Christians have sought to define the boundaries of belief: the irreducible minimum of what you needed to believe to be an orthodox Christian. These creedal statements often reflect contemporary doctrinal controversies. Some argue that what we have now as accepted belief is simply the result of a power struggle between conflicting visions of faith. Christianity could, they argue, have gone in a very different direction. In our intellectual climate there is great reluctance to judge between conflicting truth claims. “What is your truth?” Oprah Witney asked the Sussexes in that famous interview. But when you look into the conflicts of the first and second centuries it is clear that the competing visions of faith that were rejected lacked coherence. The so-called gnostic gospels are sometimes cited as repressed texts. But if you read them they are just plain bonkers. Written several centuries after the original ones they say much more about a pseudo-Christian sect than they do about Jesus’ revelation of himself. The creeds are the culmination of a work of discernment between right and wrong understandings of God. A commentator might have said of these arguments the same we would say of reflecting on different religions today. We might all be wrong, but we can’t all be right. But as CS Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”
The Apostles creed starts with the glorious affirmation: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Behind everything is the personal God, with a personhood analogous to our own. Technically, we are analogous to him rather than the other way around. Paul says in Ephesians 3: 14 that he kneels before the Father from whom every family in heaven and earth derives its name. Not only is God personal and therefore the fundamental thing about being human is relational, but he is the creator: he lies behind everything. Arguments about whether he did this in six days or whether the world is the result of intelligent design miss the point of this affirmation, they are just discussions of methodology. God is the first cause of everything from the cosmos to cockroaches.
Some years ago, I visited St. Peters in Rome and saw Michelangelo’s pieta in the original for the first time. You’ll be familiar with it from the many copies of Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. It captures Mary’s grief in the most extraordinary moving way. Michelangelo’s intent was to present something of this mystery in stone. It realises that purpose brilliantly. This work of art speaks of a human creator who demonstrates purpose and meaning in the work. How much more then the personal God in bringing a cosmos into being assures us that this world is not random. By derivation, our lives have meaning. By nature of God’s authorship, we have purpose and know we are loved. This is not an arid, dogmatic assertion, simply for theological discussion. We believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Because he is, we are. Life has meaning, purpose and significance. This is the reality that is a foundation for life, but there is yet more richness to explore as we will over the next few weeks.
+Richard