``WE BELIEVE''
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A Study of the Doctrines
of the |
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Part Three: ``... in
Jesus Christ His only-begotten Son, our Lord...'' |
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by Jared L. Olar |
With this installment we commence the study of the second article of the Creed,
the doctrine of God the Son. It should be clear from the number of words that
the Creed devotes to this doctrine that this is the central article of the
Christian Creed. Of necessity, then, we shall spend the next few installments
discussing the doctrine of the Son of God. We shall begin our discussion with
the subjects of the Messiahship, the Sonship, and the Lordship, of Jesus the
son of Mary.
However, before commencing our discussion, let us briefly revisit and review the subject of the previous installment. Last time, we studied the doctrine of God the Father as it relates to biblical testimony, to the tradition of the Creed, and to current and former teachings of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). As we saw, throughout its history the WCG has consistently upheld and proclaimed the essence of the first article of the Creed.
It is, however, definitely worth observing that our ``Statement of Beliefs'' does not have-in fact has never had-a doctrinal article devoted specifically to God the Father. Rather, this doctrine is only covered in passing, under the broader and more general subject heading of the doctrine of God. This is in striking contrast to the Nicene Creed's treatment of the doctrine of God, which begins with the doctrine of monotheism-God is One-and then treats the doctrines of God the Father, God the Son, and God the holy Spirit in succession. The Apostles' Creed has no explicit affirmation of monotheism, whether trinitarian monotheism or monotheism of any other sort, but it otherwise shows the same outline as the later Nicene Creed-treating the doctrine of God the Father first in order, and with an article all its own.
At the beginning of this survey, I pointed out that creeds and confessions of faith are important not only for what they say, but also for what they leave unsaid. It may or may not be a related phenomenon that in recent years the WCG has placed most of its doctrinal and confessional emphasis upon Jesus Christ and the holy Spirit. Formerly our primary emphasis tended to be upon God the Father, in constrast to the past several years' strong focus upon Jesus Christ. I would suggest that this focus upon God the Son, with a concomitant weakening of our focus on God the Father, has unconsciously been incorporated into our ``Statement of Beliefs.'' In the future we shall have to improve our doctrinal synopsis by treating the doctrine of the Father under its own heading.
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Jesus is the Christ: |
In its nearly seven decades of history, the WCG has had an awful lot to say about
Jesus Christ, so I will draw attention to just three WCG publications that have
addressed ``christology.'' First and most notably, though the subject of Jesus
Christ was not treated in a chapter all its own in Herbert Armstrong's Mystery
of the Ages, hardly a page of that book does not touch on christological
doctrines and issues. The first and seventh of Mr. Armstrong's ``mysteries''
devote a great deal of attention to our former beliefs regarding Jesus Christ.
Also, some two decades ago Mr. Armstrong's son Garner Ted Armstrong, then one
of our evangelists, wrote a book entitled The Real Jesus, which covers
much of the same ground as that covered by Philip Yancey's recent The Jesus
I Never Knew, albeit by no means as accurately or with the depth and insight
that Yancey's volume displays. Understandably, since we were all starting from
scratch, so to speak, and together learning about and attempting to explain
afresh the Gospel of the Kingdom, over time our teachings pertaining to Jesus
displayed a great deal of change and improvement. These improvements are
reflected in our most recent treatment of this subject, Who Was Jesus?.
Regrettably, looking back one can see that not everything we taught about Christ was as faithful to the Scriptures, or as logically consistent, as we once thought it to be. But, as I think will become evident, in certain basic christological doctrines our teachings have never varied. Even so, it must also be regretted that, whether intentionally or not, in recent years some of our members and ministers have begun to make uninformed statements that imply, or even assert plainly, that appreciation for Jesus Christ-or even His very spiritual presence-was absent in the pre-1995 WCG. These kinds of statements have even begun to appear in official WCG publications. But anyone who is, or becomes, familiar with the past teachings and culture of the WCG (which were, it should be kept in mind, deliberately and consciously non-Protestant) will see that Jesus Christ has always been of the greatest importance to us in every way imaginable-as must inevitably be the case in a Christian fellowship. God deserves constant praise for having given us the indescribable blessing of the fellowship of His Son through the entirety of our history.
To begin our exploration of the second article of the Creed, here is what the ``Statement of Beliefs'' of the WCG has to say about Jesus Christ:
``Jesus is the Word, by whom
and for whom God created all things. As God manifest in the flesh for our
salvation, he was begotten of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary,
fully God and fully human, two natures in one Person. Jesus is the Son of
God and Lord of all, worthy of worship, honor and reverence. As the prophesied
Savior of humanity, he died for our sins, was raised bodily from the dead, and
ascended to heaven, from where he mediates between humanity and God. He
will come again in glory to reign as King of kings over all nations in the
Anyone even mildly familiar with the doctrinal tradition of the WCG will quickly recognise that the above statement neatly epitomises virtually everything this church fellowship has ever had to say about Jesus. Of course, from the first edition of our ``Statement of Beliefs'' in 1991, our doctrinal statement on Jesus Christ has since varied in several subtle but not unimportant ways. We will discuss the significance of these reforms and modifications each in their proper place. At this time, however, please note the above reference to Jesus being ``fully God and fully human, two natures in one Person.'' This is the most immediately noticeable change in our ``Statement of Beliefs,'' and I would say also that it is the most important one. On the subject of Jesus Christ's divinity and humanity, we were formerly unwittingly unclear and inconsistent. In the next installment we will explore the biblical doctrine of the Incarnation as well as its extra-biblical but logically necessary corollary, the doctrine of the Two Natures. For now it is enough to note that in every other way the WCG has really always adhered to the above-shown doctrines-it just took some time for our explanations to catch up to our beliefs.
Christianity's central and distinctive claim is that a Jew named Jesus
is the Christ-that is, the Messiah (Matt.
Why is Jesus called ``Christ''? Every Christian should know that ``Christ''
is a Greek word meaning ``Anointed One''-that is, in Hebrew and Christian
culture, someone who has had olive oil ceremonially applied to his head or
body. ``Christ'' is a translation of the Hebrew word ``Mashiyach'' (whence
comes the word Messiah) which has the same basic meaning. However, in Hebrew
culture this title refers not just to anyone who has been anointed with oil,
but specifically to kings and priests (I Sam.
We see, then, that Jesus is not the only person entitled to be termed
a messiah, just as He is not the only king or the only priest. Saul, the very
first King of Israel, was called ``the Eternal's Anointed One''-i.e., the mashiyach
or messiah of Yahveh (I Sam. 24:6). Frequently in ancient Hebrew literature, in
both biblical and non-biblical writings, when a writer refers to a ``messiah,''
he means the King of Judah or the High Priest, not necessarily the prophesied
Messiah. In addition to the numerous Israelite messiahs who lived before the
birth of Jesus, in a very important sense we can say that even after Jesus
ascended to heaven there have been-and are still today-many, many messiahs. In
the WCG we have long recognised that the consecrated olive oil used in
anointing rituals signifies God's Spirit. Whenever someone enters the
Again, the Apostle Peter spoke of Christians as members of God's ``royal priesthood'' (I Peter 2:9), while in the Book of Revelation we read that Jesus ``has made us kings and priests''(Rev. 1:6). In the past we in the WCG expected to become kings and priests after the Second Coming, which is true enough-but in recent years we have begun to see that our royal and sacerdotal state commences at baptism. Yes, the plant reaches maturity in the resurrection, but the seed germinates and starts to grow in this life. We don't have to wait for the return of Christ to begin to enjoy these blessings. This is the doctrine of ``the Priesthood of all Believers''-a doctrinal concept that has always been accepted by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant communions. It is nothing less than the realisation of God's original desire for His People (Ex. 19:5-6).
We have seen how the Christian Creed starts with God the Father and then
moves on to God the Son. The other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and
Islam, disagree with the Church about Jesus' Messiahship. Jewish faith does not
accept Jesus' Messiahship at all, though some Jews are willing to admit Jesus
as an important (and, of course, misunderstood) Jewish rabbi. (As an aside, it
has sometimes been difficult to tell whether it is the Jews or the Christians
who are the most uncomfortable with the fact that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.) In
Islam, however, Jesus is actually accepted as the Messiah-but this Messiahship
is limited to
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Jesus is the Son of God: |
In the previous installment, we saw how the most important aspect of the doctrine
of God the Father was the fact that the Messiah is the Son of God. In the
Scriptures we find God's own affirmation of this truth in II Sam.
As a rule, we in the WCG have not really had much trouble declaring that
Jesus is the Son of God. However, we were confused about the way that
Jesus is God's Son. For instance, we have from the very start affirmed in the
strongest of terms that Jesus was the Pre-existent Logos, and had always
existed with God the Father. In fact, as we saw last time, we formerly believed
that the God who dealt with mankind and
Later we learned some vital historical facts of which Mr. Armstrong seems never to have been aware, but which have been well-known to most other Christians for nearly two millennia. It turns out that John's verbal imagery of a divine ``Word'' of God was not original to him, but came from a Jewish teacher named Philo, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, about the time that Jesus was born. Philo sought to defend the Torah against the skepticism of the Greek philosophers, and the method he chose for his defense was to explain the Law of Moses and the Jewish concept of monotheism using the language and concepts of Greek philosophy. Philo used the Stoic concept of logos (``word, utterance, reason, thought'') to explain how the infinite Almighty God manifests Himself within His finite Creation to speak to His Children. An infinite God can never make Himself completely known-cannot fully reveal Himself-to His creatures without obliterating the entire universe in the process. Therefore, in Philo's thought, God's logos serves as a sort of mediator between Creator and creature. Thus, the numerous instances in the Hebrew Scriptures where God appeared to His servants were not complete revelations of the Almighty-in the strictest sense the burning bush, for instance, was not really God-but were rather the presence and activity of God's logos. To Philo, this divine logos was God's infinite and eternal Reason and Mind, but it was not really God Himself-it is God, and yet it is not. Most significantly, Philo even likened the relationship between God and His logos to that which a father has with his son.
In the light of these teachings of Philo Judaeus, John's theological
discourse in the beginning chapters of His gospel is shown to be a Christian
adaptation of Philo's logos doctrine. In the first chapter of his
Gospel, John utilised the reasoning and language of Philo in a way that Philo
could not have anticipated. The divine something that Philo had dubbed
God's logos, and had described as the son of God, John asserted had
somehow become a flesh-and-blood human being-in fact, a Jewish man named
Jesus. (Along this line, John makes a special point of drawing his Gentile
readers' attention to the fact that everything about Jesus, indeed about
salvation itself, is fundamentally and inescapably Jewish-cf. John 4:20-22;
5:1; 6:4; 7:2;
In other words, the Word was ``incarnate,'' a term that cannot be used for the temporary manifestations of God in a physical form (whether human or otherwise) that are described in the Hebrew Scriptures. The technical term for such divine appearances is theophany, not incarnation. Somehow God's own Mind had come down from heaven and become a human being! The human mind is incapable of fathoming just how the miracle of the Incarnation could occur, but we should be clear about one thing: the birth of Jesus was not the moment when the Word became the Son of God. Rather, in the words of Matt and Sharon Kalliman's song ``The Victory of History,'' that was when ``the Son of God became the Son of Man.''
The Kallimans' song is proof that some of us had the proper understanding of this point long before the WCG leadership learned that we as a church were in error. The language of the successive editions of our ``Statement of Beliefs'' shows that it took time for us to shed the misconception that Jesus became the Son of God. The first edition (1991) said, ``Jesus was the Word, .... During his earthly life, Jesus was the Son of God,....'' The use of the past tense throughout this doctrinal article implies that Jesus once was the Word, but is the Word no longer. But then, whether intentionally or just as a result of poorly-chosen words, we actually went on to say that Jesus was the Son of God only during His life here on earth (something I do not think even Mr. Armstrong believed). That implies not only that Jesus as the Pre-existent Word was not the Son of God before the Incarnation, but also that Jesus is not the Son of God any longer. In the 1993 version we find marked improvement: ``Jesus was the Word, .... Jesus is the Son of God and Lord of all, ....'' In 1995 we finally cleaned up the rest of our grammatical tenses: ``Jesus is the Word,....''
So, what do the Scriptures mean when they say that Jesus is the Son of God? As we saw last time, simply as a human being, and especially as a member of the Chosen People, Jesus would quite justly be able to enjoy the title ``son of God.'' But John insists that Jesus is God's Son in a way that no other human being is, whether Israelite or Gentile. This unique Sonship is summed up in the adjective ``only-begotten''-in Greek, monogenes . There is something about this divine Sonship that transcends the divine Sonship the rest of us enjoy. What exactly sets Jesus apart?
Simply put, it is that Jesus is the eternal Logos of God-the Mind, Personality, Thought, and Will of God the Father. As our beloved evangelist Dr. Herman Hoeh explained in 1992, because God has eternally existed it follows that His Thought has been eternally proceeding from His Mind. There simply could never have been a time when the Eternal's Thought was not being generated by His Mind. Otherwise, logically that means there would have been a time when God was ``brain-dead'' and then somehow acquired consciousness. That is almost the same as claiming that God is not eternal, but came into existence at a point in time-and a God who is not eternal is not really God. But the God of Israel ``inhabits eternity.'' And in this analogy that John adapted from Philo, the way thoughts come from our minds, or words come from our mouths, or sons come from their fathers, the Word comes from God the Father. So the divine Son is just as much the Eternal God as the divine Father-this we in the WCG have always believed, though not with enough understanding I fear.
All of these truths are contained within, and implied by, the Apostles' Creed's words ``His only-begotten Son.'' Later, due to the rise of Arianism-the belief that Jesus was merely the highest created being but not fully God-the Church incorporated explicit affirmations of the Son of God's full divinity into the Creed: ``Born of the Father before all ages. God of God; Light of Light; true God of true God. Begotten not made; of one being with the Father; by Whom all things were made.'' The WCG's ``Statement of Beliefs'' echoes this doctrine-and I would say that, despite our confusion (I for one had no real understanding of what was meant by ``born of the Father before all ages,'' or ``begotten not made'') on a certain level we have always believed these things about Jesus. Indeed, we always would have been able to affirm the christological doctrines of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds (though formerly we had heterodox, even heretical, misinterpretations of some of the relevant clauses). I am very happy that we finally have it all clear in our minds-and that our words, our convictions, and our interpretation of the relevant words of Scripture, have finally been brought into harmony.
It is now clear just what the holy Spirit's intent really was in proclaiming
through Nathan the Prophet that the Messiah would be God's Son, and God would
be the Messiah's Father. It is also clear what Jesus really meant when He
asserted, ``I and My Father are One'' (John
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Jesus is Lord: |
Here we come to a topic that in a Christian fellowship ought to be one of the
least controversial aspects of the christological doctrines. It certainly has
been for my church. We in the WCG have always believed that Jesus is our Lord.
Indeed, even those who deny that Christ is fully divine can accept the Lordship
of Jesus Christ. Of course, that would be missing a very important aspect of
Jesus' Lordship, but it is all the same quite possible to commit one's self to
submission and obedience to Jesus Christ without understanding who He really
is. It can be, and often is, the beginning of a spiritual pilgrimage that
brings one in due course to a more complete relationship with Jesus.
I have already discussed the poor choice of words found under the doctrinal heading of Jesus Christ in the first edition of our ``Statement of Beliefs.'' Returning briefly to that subject, it should be mentioned that at first we did not include an explicit affirmation that Jesus is Lord in our ``Statement of Beliefs.'' Admittedly, this was strongly implied, but it was never made explicit. Furthermore, we stated:
``During his earthly life, Jesus was the Son of God, worthy of honor and reverence ....''
We have already seen that this sentence implies that Jesus
was Son of God only during His life on earth. Thus, it also implies that Jesus
was worthy of honor and reverence only while He was walking on the soil of the
``Jesus is the Son of God and Lord of all, worthy of honor and reverence.''
The Lordship of Jesus Christ is proclaimed in such
Scriptures as Luke 2:11; John
Our modern word ``Lord'' carries the connotation of authority and power, but I was delighted to learn that the ancient form of this word was Hlaford, which literally means ``Bread-giver.'' Thus, at first the word ``Lord'' connoted not just someone in authority, but even more, someone in authority who provides for the needs of those whom he governs. . That is the kind of Master we Christians have-not a domineering and tyrannical taskmaster, but a leader who ``gives us this day our daily bread.'' Would that all our earthly lords governed us according to the example of our heavenly lord!
Having compared the Lord Jesus with human lords and rulers, I want to be sure we recognise that Jesus is not just Lord because He has obtained or acquired a dominion that He did not always have. That is the case of ordinary human rulers, but Jesus' Lordship is a divine attribute, meaning it is an eternal attribute of the Son of God. When the Church says, ``Jesus is Lord,'' She means that He is the divine personage called Adonai by the Jews (cf. Psa. 110). He is the Lord because He is the Lord God. The Nicene Creed emphasises this fact by referring to Jesus as ``one Lord''-His Lordship is just as unique as His Messiahship and His Sonship.
Seeing all these things-the Messiahship, the Sonship, and the Lordship of Jesus-I eagerly add my voice to the chorus of believers who affirm, ``I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only-begotten Son, our Lord.''
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To be continued .... |
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