In Scot McKnight book The King Jesus Gospel, which I reviewed a little while ago, Scot issued an interesting challenge: “I have always encountered people who boldly announce to me that they are ‘noncredal’ and even say ‘I don’t believe in the creeds’ because of their next words: ‘I believe in the Bible.’ I respond with one question, and I think I ask this question because I too was at one time one of their number: ‘What line or lines in the Nicene Creed do you not believe?’”  He states later in the same paragraph that “there’s nothing there not to believe.”

With the deepest respect to Scot, this post is my response to his question.  In point of fact, I have what I think are several reasonable objections to the Nicene Creed, which I’m going to lay out below.  First of all, here’s the text I’m using.  There are several variants, and I had to pick one, so I went with the version I found at www.reformed.org/documents/nicene.html:

The Nicene Creed

I 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 only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

I’m not going to do a complete line-by-line commentary of the Nicene Creed because it’d get real boring real fast.  I will stipulate, in answer to the objections that I’m sure some will raise, that there is a historical context in which the various clauses of the Nicene Creed (and others) may be more fully understood.  But part of the error in insisting upon the creeds, in my view, is precisely that the creeds are taught in most churches as a thing to be believed and assented to, entirely devoid of their historical context.  In fact, if we looked more frequently at the controversies that were being considered, which influenced various clauses in the creed, I rather suspect more of us might come to the conclusion I have, that some of those old arguments don’t compel us as they compelled the Fathers who fought over them in the third, fourth and fifth centuries.

At any rate, the following paragraphs address my major thoughts or objections.

I believe …

Strange as it may seem, my first objection comes with the very first two words, “I believe.”  I’ve mentioned before that I see the Shema of the Old Testament, quoted by Jesus in Mark 12:29-31 among other places, as one of the best examples of a creed actually in the Bible.  The Shema starts off with a simple declarative statement “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”  The focus is not the fact that we believe something, it is the reality that there is a God and He is one.  God is God, and God is there, and God is one, regardless of what you, I, or anybody else thinks or believes.  The shift from “there is a God” to “I believe in a God” may seem subtle to some, but to me it implies that the individual’s assent is the important thing.

Furthermore, the Shema goes from declaring that there is one God, to commanding that this God is to be loved as Lord.  The creeds, on the other hand, focus merely on “right thoughts,” that is, giving intellectual assent to the existence and character of God.  This is part of the shift from discipleship to religion against which I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog.

… the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds… (referring to Jesus)

This is not a section I actually take issue with, though I do take issue with the proposition that it matters.  What I mean by this is that this clause, along with the “begotten, not made” clause later, address the issue of Jesus’ pre-creation existence.  While I do see texts in scripture that suggest Jesus did in fact pre-exist creation (not least the first chapter of John, and John 8:58), I don’t know that a dogma of Jesus’ origin, and the timetable of his existence, is something we actually need to care about.  Sure, the biblical evidence suggests these clauses are true (I think).  But I fail to see what difference it makes.  I certainly don’t countenance the Constantinople Council’s anathematization of anyone who disagreed.

… God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God … (referring to Jesus)

I rather suspect that only a tiny fraction of everyone who recites this phrase has any clue what it even means.  I’m not sure I do.  I presume it’s referring in some way to Jesus’ divinity, and the commentaries on it that I find through a quick Google suggest the same, though interestingly I find an alternative translation “God from God, Light from Light” etc., which may even be compatible with the divine-yet-subordinate position that I have previously suggested is a more accurate characterization of what Jesus said about himself–that is, that he comes from, and is therefore distinct from, the Father.  So my objection to this phrase depends on how the speaker interprets it:  if as a classic Trinitarian construction that places Jesus as fully divine and equal to the Father, I object to the content; if rather it’s just something the speaker doesn’t comprehend, I then object to reciting as credal, words that have no meaning to the speaker.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life …

It’s in Pneumatology that I really start to take serious issue with the Nicene Creed.  This is one place where this creed goes far beyond its antecedent Apostles’ Creed, which merely stated “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” full-stop, with no qualification or theorizing.  Whatever the Holy Spirit is or is not (and on this I have previously written), I can think of no place in the Scriptures where the Holy Spirit is referred to as Lord, and “Giver of Life” is mis-attributed altogether.  The two texts to which I would point for this latter would be Genesis 2:7 and its beautiful New Testament mirror in John 20:22.  In Genesis it is God the Father who breathes the breath of life into man (“breath” and “spirit” are synonyms in Greek and, I’m told, in Hebrew too), and in John it is Jesus who breathes the Holy Spirit onto the disciples, initiating or symbolizing their new life in the new Kingdom.  The Spirit is, if anything, the life that is given, not its giver.

… who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified … (referring to the Holy Spirit)

I can find no place in the Scripture that admonishes or commands anyone to worship the Holy Spirit, nor states that the Spirit is glorified.  Nor can I think of any reference to people doing so.  The Breath of God is, as I wrote before, the tangible and very active presence of God working and speaking in the world, but it is never an object of worship.

There is more, I am sure, to be said, and this post is more of an opening for dialog than anything definitive.  Nevertheless each of the above objections is, I believe, a reasonable point to challenge the Nicea crowd for going beyond what is written in some rather substantial ways.

There remain areas where, while I say it differently, I do believe things that are substantially similar to the statements of the great creeds.  I illustrated as much in my post What IS a Christian, Anyway? I’m not saying the creeds are all wrong, but I do hold that emphasizing them is most assuredly wrong.  As Tom Wright stated in a recent lecture at Calvin College, “It is possible to check the credal boxes, and miss the larger reality to which they are the signposts.”  More than that, I would say without reservation that the Nicene Creed includes several boxes that ought not to be checked at all.

Those who know me well may have seen this coming…but now that we’ve looked at the Holy Spirit, not as a “being” but as the Wind/Breath of God (see this post if you haven’t already read it), it’s time to take another look at an old friend.  I refer, of course, to θεόπνευστος (“theopneustos”) from 2 Tim. 3:16.  Those who already know Greek will know, and the perceptive among the rest of you may notice, that this is a compound of θεός (“theos,” god–not necessarily the Christian one) and a form of πνεῦμα (“pneuma”, wind or breath or spirit as previously discussed).

The usual translation of θεόπνευστος, as nearly everybody knows, is “inspired” or “God-breathed,” and is the source of the common notion that what Paul was saying to Timothy was that the scriptural canon was breathed out by God…that is, that God is the source of “all scripture” (I’ve previously argued–1 & 2–that this statement cannot legitimately be read as an imprimatur on the entirety of our current canon).  Unfortunately, it appears that Paul coined a word that has no antecedent in classical Greek literature and only occurs once in the entire biblical text.  We are therefore stuck with the task of deducing what he meant by taking the word apart into its constituent parts, and one possibility (of course) is that the translators are right, that equivalents of “breathed out by God” are in fact correct and that Paul is saying that those scriptures which “are able to make you wise unto salvation” (v. 17) actually come from God.

But what if θεόπνευστος is not “breathed out,” but rather “breathed upon” or “breathed into?”  Might Paul be suggesting that the written words, lifeless in and of themselves, become profitable–even powerful–when they are infused with the life-giving Breath of the Father?  Perhaps it’s not an issue of writings being “inspired” at all, but rather what happens when these writings become “in-spirited” in the context of believers individually and collectively seeking God through them.  It stands to reason that any writing, whether by the canonical authors, by modern believers, or even by secular writers, becomes highly profitable if and when it’s enlivened by the Breath of Life.

This is not to suggest that God is not the actual source of any of the biblical writings.  2 Pet. 2:20-21 is one good example of how God clearly and specifically moved prophets to write and speak specific words to his people.  Our task as believers is to discern those words–and the spirit within them–and to pray that God will yet again breathe upon us as we seek to be equipped for his work.

In my last post I took issue with common Christian creeds’ trinitarian characterization of the Holy Spirit.  This time I’m going to take a look at another element of common Evangelical statements of faith: the claim that the Holy Spirit “indwells every believer.”  This teaching makes the claim that the Holy Spirit is bestowed upon everyone who “believes in Christ” (a phrase fraught with its own baggage), and essentially dwells in the believer for life.

As with most required doctrines, this one doesn’t stand up well to comparison with what scripture actually says.  Let’s start with the most obvious evidence, two historical accounts in Acts.  Acts 8:14-17 relates how Peter and John were sent to Samaria, to a group who had believed in Jesus, who were even “baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” but who did not receive the Holy Spirit until the prayer of Peter and John.  The second account is Acts 19:1-7, in which a group of “disciples” had already received the baptism of John (and given the use of the term “disciples,” one would believe already accepted the message of Jesus’ lordship), but who had not even heard of the Holy Spirit, which was given to them when Paul laid his hands on them after baptism.  The evidence is pretty straightforward: unless we accept a dispensational interpretation nowhere supported in the New Testament, it is possible both to believe in Jesus and to be baptised in his name, and yet not have received the Holy Spirit.

The second part of this doctrine is the implicit notion that whatever receiving the Holy Spirit means, it’s a once-and-done event.  Here, too, the scriptural evidence would suggest otherwise.  There are, of course, numerous accounts in the Old Testament (particularly the books of Samuel and Kings) where the Spirit of God seems to come and go from the same individuals…usually kings or minor prophets.  But even in Acts, it is interesting to note that the same people are shown to have been “filled with the Holy Spirit” at least twice:  see Acts 2:4 and Acts 4:31.  Furthermore, we learn in Acts 6:3-5 that a condition for selecting the men to serve as the first deacons (this is when Stephen was ordained), was that these be men “full of the Spirit.”   This requirement is nonsensical, unless there is either (1) such a thing as a believer who has not received the Spirit at all, or (2) at least varying degrees of “filledness” with the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps as intriguing as anything, though, is Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 7:40 that, in relation to a command he’s just given, “I think I, too, have the Spirit of God.”  This claim truly makes no sense if every believer is always-and-forever indwelt by the Spirit.

The principal reason I believe this error matters, is that it allows us to cop out of a major self-examination desperately needed by both individual believers and the church as a body.  Here’s what I mean:  throughout the Bible, when the Breath of God moves in and through an individual or a group, something big happens–and by “big” I do not mean people get teary-eyed or feel a major case of the warm fuzzies.  Countless times, it results in the individual prophesying (Num. 11:25, 1 Sam. 10:10, 1 Sam. 19:20, Luke 1:67, Acts 19:6).  It can result in people speaking in languages other than their own (Acts 2:4, Acts 10:46).  It can also result in superhuman strength (Judges 15:14) or even physical transportation (Acts 8:39).  The Spirit of God doesn’t always make a splash; Isaiah 11:2 refers to the overall anointing of Messiah’s life (though when this actually happened (Luke 3:22 and parallels) it was certainly obvious enough.

An interesting aside here–if the conventional notion of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ being persons of the Trinity were true, why does scripture report the Holy Spirit coming on Jesus, not only in Luke 3:22, but also his self-proclamation in Luke 4:18-19?  How can one “person” of a “godhead” receive another “person?”

Anyhow, my point here is, what is the evidence of the Breath of God blowing through our churches today?  It is my stubborn belief that, if God’s mighty wind were to blow in our midst, we wouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics to believe it, we’d have the evidence smacking us in the face!  And if, as I regretfully suspect, those who lead the Body of Christ have so thoroughly quenched the spirit that God has taken his action elsewhere, what are we–what are you–what am I–going to do about it?

I approach this subject with a bit more caution than some of my posts, because I know it’s going to be particularly sensitive to some readers…enough so, in fact, that a couple caveats are necessary at the outset.  First and foremost, while in the next couple posts I’m going to challenge a number of commonly-held teachings about the Holy Spirit, I am NOT denying either (1) that the Holy Spirit is real, or (2) that the Holy Spirit comes from God the Father.  I acknowledge Jesus’ warning in Matt. 12:31, paralleled in Mark 3:29 and Luke 12:10, that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable; however, the context in Matthew and Mark makes it clear that what Jesus was talking about here was an accusation that the work he was doing through the Spirit of God, was actually of the devil.  This is not what I am saying, nor should it so be taken.

With the caveats properly stated, though, I will come to the first point.  Christian doctrine has held since the very early days, that the Holy Spirit is a “hypostasis” or “person” of a triune godhead.  I have previously suggested that the notion of the Trinity doesn’t square well with the way Jesus represented himself and his relationship to the Father; now here I will add that the Spirit of God as described in the Gospels and Acts, also doesn’t lend itself well to the Trinitarian definition.  I just took a look at every occurrence of the word in all four Gospels plus Acts, and while the Spirit is heavily in evidence throughout all five accounts, the sense of the word seems to me far more like an amorphous presence than a distinct entity, and nowhere in all five books is there any claim that God’s Spirit (which is clearly bestowed upon others from time to time, and which clearly influences events) is actually a form or being of God himself (though it unquestionably comes from God).

The word in Greek which is translated “Spirit” as in “Holy Spirit” is nothing more than the word πνεῦμα (pneuma).  This same word is also translated as “ghost,” “breath,” and “wind” in various places and by various translators.  Sometimes it’s linked to the word “holy,” and other times it stands by itself.  But by separating the concept of “breath/wind” from the concept of “spirit,” English Bible translators have created a divided concept which fits well with standard creeds, but masks a much less clear-cut concept in the actual text.  Perhaps the most intriguing passage I found to illustrate this point was John 3:8, which says:

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Both the word “wind” in the beginning of the verse, and “Spirit” at the end, are the exact same word in Greek.  We may think “the Spirit blows where it wishes” or “everyone born of the wind” make no sense, but that has more to do with the doctrines we’ve built around the Holy Spirit than it does with solid translation.  If we were to allow the original language to speak for itself, the metaphor of the “breath of God” actually pervades the Bible all the way from Genesis on.  In the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures done about 200 years before Jesus, the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters is a form of the same Greek word (the wind of God moving over the waters…think about it), and even more beautifully, when in Genesis 2, God breaths into man the breath of life, it’s also the same word–actually the Greek synonym πνοὴν (pnoe). 

This latter parallels spectacularly with Jesus’ breathing on the disciples and saying “receive the Holy Spirit (breath)” in John 20:22.  Just as the breath of God is what made man “a living soul” in Genesis 2, so the breath of Jesus made man a living soul in the New Creation of the resurrected Christ.

So why am I saying this?  Do I really care whether we use the term “Holy Spirit” or the maybe more-poetic term “Breath of God” to refer to the influencing presence God sometimes bestows on his people?  Well yes, I do, but not as a matter of semantics.  I’ll get into how the coming of the Holy Breath is actually described in scripture, next time.  But for now, I care because the doctrinal statements to which Evangelicals are often expected to subscribe, include assent to an explicit and detailed doctrine of the Trinity.  Nothing new here…the old creeds have been demanding as much since at least the third or fourth century, though interestingly, the Apostles’ Creed only states “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” without any details of just what that belief must entail.  Nevertheless, I’m afraid this is another area where our Christian authorities’ obsession with lists of things one must think in order not to be damned, has overtaken the simple message of the Gospel.  The expectation of the church is that we think and speak and teach a certain way.  The expectation of Jesus was, and is, that we live a certain way, influenced by the wind of his Father blowing through us.

As longtime readers of this blog already know, a number of the issues I have addressed here come from my collisions with classic Evangelical statements of faith.  One common element of such statements is a clause on the Trinity.  Here’s a good example, cribbed from the website of a well-known Evangelical organization:

 This simple phrase is further amplified by the new EFCA statement of faith:

 There’s a long tradition behind the notion of Jesus as fully God and fully human, dating at least back to the Nicea, as immortalized in the Nicene Creed:

 But with all due respect (but no more than due) to the church fathers, I’m not absolutely sure they got it right.  There can be no doubt that Jesus represented himself as divine.  I refer you to an excellent word study my Mom published over at the Pioneers’ New Testament, on the subject of Jesus use of the “I AM” phraseology–a construct that made no sense at all in Greek unless it was hearking back to God’s declaration to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14).  There’s no reasonable question that his hearers heard Jesus characterizing himself as divine, either, as they tried more than once to stone him for blasphemy when he said it (see John 10:30-33).

Nevertheless, Jesus also, and just as clearly, referred to himself and the Father in language that seems awfully much like he saw God the Father as truly and distinctly other than himself.  Take for example Matt. 10:32-33, where Jesus speaks of acknowledging and/or denying people before his father, or Matt. 11:27 where he describes having authority delegated to him by his Father.  Or look at Matt. 20:23, where Jesus tells James and John and their mom that the authority to decide who sits at his right and left hand, has been reserved by the father and is “not mine to grant.”  Perhaps most tellingly, Jesus’ prayer to his Father in the garden that the cup of his suffering pass from him, does not sound like a unity of being.  These passages all  have their parallels in the other gospels; I’m not trying to be exhaustive here, but rather to point out the case that is to be made.

The question, then, is why we must make a big deal out of determining the appropriate Christology to think, in order to be judged a worthy disciple of Christ the King.  It took between two hundred and three hundred years for the church to come to the point of carving out the distinction (Nicea was in the early 300s–a time when a lot else got loused up by the church as well).  I submit that a healthier, and more biblical approach, would be to live with the tension of Jesus’ divinity and his humanity–to recognize that when he referred to there being only one God, he was referring to his Father at the same time that he knew he, also, was begotten by the Father in a divine, non-human sense before creation, and then incarnated as the Word become flesh at a later point in history.

Bottom line, it doesn’t take sorting out the finer details of this paradox, to get us down to the business of following him.   We would do well to get our priorities in order.