'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part IV

Let’s just get right to it:

Article 3:

Current Text:

God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father.  Through Him all things were made.

Beginning in Advent 2011:

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.  Through Him all things were made.

Ok, let’s remember who we’re talking about here.  The first Article of Faith talked about God the Father.  The second one talked about God the Son, a.k.a. Jesus Christ.  Here in the third Article, we’re continuing to talk about Jesus.  In fact, most of the Nicene Creed (or more properly Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed) deals with Jesus—probably because the writing of the Creed, if you remember, was a direct response to Arianism and the idea that Jesus was not both fully human and fully divine.  So here we’re talking about the relationship between God the Son (Jesus) and God the Father. 

“God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” was included in the Nicene Creed as a direct blow to the arguments of Arianism.  To explain this, we’ll need a short philosophy lesson, specifically, a metaphysics lesson.  See, Aristotle (Greek philosopher) said that everything in the world has 2 metaphysical properties: substance & accidents.  Substance is WHAT a thing is, while accidents are the properties and qualities that make up the object.  Let’s take a chair, for example...just an ordinary, wooden chair with 4 legs, a seat, and a back.  The substance of the chair is that it’s a chair…quite simply.  The accidents of the chair are that it’s wooden has 4 legs, a seat, and a back.  Its accidents can also include the fact that it’s brown, it’s 4 ½’ tall, it has a padded leather seat, etc.  With people, it gets a little more complicated.  Take me, for example.  My substance is “person.”  My accidents are that I’m 5’11”, I have brown hair, hazel eyes, I’m 28 years old, I enjoy long walks on the beach and candlelit dinners…oh, sorry, this is a philosophy lesson, not a Match.com profile…besides, I’m married.  Anyway, with God, it’s exponentially more complicated.  God’s accidents are pretty much unknown to us.  We can try to describe them as best we can, but because he’s infinite and has no “body” that we can see and describe the characteristics of, I’m content here just saying that God’s accidents are unable to be understood by humanity.  Simple enough.  Now for something we can go into slight detail on: God’s substance.  Quite plainly, God’s substance is “God”, whether you’re talking about God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit.  They are of the same substance, meaning they share the same basic form of existence.  If that’s enough for you to help more solidly profess your faith, awesome!  If not, welcome to the world of aspiring theologians who exhaust their mental capabilities daily in hopes of trying to understand what probably CAN’T be understood by our simple, limited human minds.

As for the last part, “Through Him all things were made,”  this is from Chapter 1, Verses 3-4 of the Gospel of John which says, “All things came to be through Him (Jesus), and without Him nothing came to be.  What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.”  This is another one of those things that we got straight from the bible.

So next post we’ll talk about the 4^th article, and so on, and so on…