June Update from Pastor Mark

Content Alert: This is an article especially for you history and theology nerds!

June 15 is Holy Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate a God who is three different persons in one divine essence. “The doctrine of the Trinity invites us to consider how a God constituted by relationship—the Father with the Son, the Son with the Spirit, the Spirit with the Father—draws us into that relationship with God and one another.” (Sundays and Seasons).

Sometimes we make the (false) assumption that the church has always looked and sounded like it does among us today. In truth, what we meet today in Scripture and Song and Prayer is part of an ever-evolving community of faith that has its origins in the life and teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; and its formative development in the first five centuries of the common era. The Christian tradition is a living tradition; it grows, changes, develops – and continues to do so (as it ought) – as it engages new challenges and questions, and an everchanging world.

Among other things happening at the time, in the third and fourth centuries church leaders (theologians, bishops) debated and even argued passionately about how best to articulate the church’s understanding of the nature of God –what results is the peculiarly Christian belief of God as triune: three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; in a single divine essence. Not everyone thought the same way or believed the same thing. At the heart of the debate was the question about the divine nature of the Son (Jesus), and the Son’s relationship to the Father. In particular, what was the Son’s “substance” or “essence” (the Greek word is hypostasis)? Two main positions emerged: 1) homo-ousious = the Son is of the same substance (consubstantial, as our Roman Catholic siblings confess today) as the Father; and 2) homoi-ousious = the Son is like / is similar to the divine substance of the Father, but not the same.  Look – carefully – again at those words. The difference is the matter of a single letter – the iota – the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet! But that little letter separated what became orthodox Christian teaching from heresy!  (And the church would never have come to such an orthodox understanding of God without the help of those whose positions were ruled out of bounds. As I have sometimes said, if you like orthodox theology, thank a heretic!)

On the one hand, Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria in Egypt, believed and argued that only God the Father is eternal and unoriginated. The Word, the pre-existent Christ (the Son), is a creature, created out of nothing, and had a beginning in time. Jesus is more than human, but less than God. Arius believe that “there was a time when he was not” – the Arian slogan. On the other hand, Bishop Alexander (also from Alexandria), championed the view that “the Father and the Son are inseparable from one another” with respect to substance; that “no distance exists between the Father and the Son.”

The matter is (mostly) settled in 325. Turns out, the year 2025 is not only Our Redeemer’s 75th Anniversary. It is also the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. The Creed of 325, adopted by nearly 300 bishops in the First Ecumenical (churchwide) Council at the seaside city of Nicaea (Iznik, today), actually goes like this:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; whose Kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit.

But as for those who say, “There was when He was not,” and, “before being born He was not,” and that “He came into existence out of nothing,” or who assert that “the Son of God is from a different hypostasis or substance, or is created, or is subject to alteration or change” – these the Catholic Church anathematizes [= condemns].

See the difference? When was the last time you anathematized anyone in church when reciting the Nicene Creed? The Nicene Creed we recite on festival Sundays and during certain seasons of the church year is better identified as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed from the Council of Constantinople in 381, a version that not only omits the anathemas  at the end (how do you feel about that), but also enlarges and rearranges some material in the second article (on the Son of God), and greatly expands the third article on the Holy Spirit and the church.

Still, the Creed of 381 is not yet what we are most familiar with. It was not until sometime in the 6th century that the filioque phrase – “and the Son” – was included in the statement about the procession of the Holy Spirit (“who proceeds from the Father and the Son”). Next time you are in worship, check out the Nicene Creed. It includes an asterisk in ELW: “Or, ‘who proceeds from the Father.’” The phrase ‘and the Son’ is an even later addition to the creed! It appears only in the Western Church – think Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, including Lutherans. Though its earliest evidence is sometime in the 6th century in Toledo, Spain, it was not adopted by the Roman Catholic Church until the 10th century. To this day, that word filioque is one of the few things that continues to divide the church into “East” and “West.”

Still, with or without that word, the Nicene Creed is the church’s earliest and most widely confessed statement of the Christian faith, what Christians believe about God. When we recite the Nicene Creed in worship, we acknowledge and celebrate our place within the broader Christian tradition and among “the whole church of Christ, in heaven and on earth.”

+ Pastor Mark

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.