After the Homily, we continue the Mass with the Profession of Faith. Now, sit back and get comfy, because this is going to be a multi-post topic, here. See, the Profession of Faith that we say today (which is about to be re-translated for Advent 2011) is a summary of what the Christian Faith teaches, but it’s not something that the Bible spells out plainly for us. However, over time, Christians recognized the need to have a concise, easily remembered way of explaining to non-Christians what we believe. But to see why it came about when it did, we need to have a little History class…..
See, in the early days of the Church (remember, before the Protestant Reformation began in the early 1500s, there’s no need to specify “Catholic” Church, because there was only ONE Christian Church: the Catholic Church), all the followers of Christ (Christians) had to go on when it came to questions of faith and beliefs about God, were the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) and the teachings of Jesus that had been passed down by word-of-mouth, until the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, then the New Testament Letters, then the Book of Revelation were written down and began to be distributed. After that, you just really hoped that the priest who was the leader of the church you attended really knew what he was talking about when it came to teaching the beliefs of the Christian Faith. After a while, though, it was only a matter of time before individual priests started to develop new theories—some good and productive, some…not so much—about what the Church should believe.
One of these priests that fell into the “not so much” category was a guy named Arius. Arius was a priest from Alexandria, Egypt who lived from about the year 250 to the year 336. He had an issue with the belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. He also proposed that Jesus, referred to in the Bible as the “Son of God,” was MADE the Son of God, and didn’t always exist in that way. This is contrary to what the Church believed at the time, and still believes today. See, we believe that Jesus is like the ULTIMATE version of the 2-in-1 classification. Let’s take shampoo, for example. 2-in-1 shampoos are pretty misleading, because it’s really 2 HALVES-in-1, in the fact that half of the mixture is meant to act as a shampoo, gently cleansing the hair, and the other half is meant to act as a conditioner, leaving the hair moisturized, shiny, and silky smooth. With Jesus, on the other hand, it’s like if it would be physically possible to have a WHOLE, say 14 oz. bottle of shampoo and a WHOLE 14 oz. bottle of conditioner fit inside a single 14 oz. bottle. Not physically possible with shampoo…but then again, we’ve stretched this shampoo analogy out way too long already, anyway. Since Jesus is fully divine, however, it IS possible that he can be FULLY human and FULLY divine. We refer to this concept as the “two natures of Christ.”
Well, as it turns out, Arius was able to convince a ton of people that HE was right and that the rest of Christianity was wrong. This was called Arianism. As you can imagine, saying that Jesus wasn’t fully divine struck a nerve with quite a few Christians at the time, and fights and arguments broke out all over the place. So now we look to Emperor Constantine, who was emperor of the Roman Empire at the time. All this fighting made him unhappy, so he broke “protocol” and invited a number of bishops of the area, himself, to come to Nicea, Italy, for an Ecumenical Council. Ecumenical Councils are meetings of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (bishops, cardinals, highly educated priests, etc.) for the purpose of carrying out their judicial and doctrinal functions, by means of deliberation in common resulting in regulations and decrees invested with the authority of the whole assembly. Or, in plain English, Ecumenical Councils are meetings of God’s chosen leaders of His Catholic Church which are meant to clarify or more deeply understand some aspect of the Catholic Faith. They are typically called by the Pope, but in the year 325, Emperor Constantine called the council. Basically, Emperor Constantine was tired of the fighting in his empire and told Pope Sylvester I and the bishops of the area, “Fix it.”
Now, it’s important to note here that Ecumenical Councils are not random priests sitting around making up new rules and regulations for the Church to adhere to just because they feel like it. Ecumenical Councils are meetings of the brightest theological minds of the time who come together to pray, study the scriptures, and openly discuss and discern what God is saying to all of humanity on a particular issue, or series of issues. The Council of Nicea was meant to restore religious peace to the Roman Empire through the composition of a summary of the Christian Faith, and also dealt with other issues, such as when to celebrate Easter every year. In the case of the summary of Christian Faith, the Council ultimately came up with this (translated literally from the Latin it was originally recorded in):
We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of the same substance with the Father, through whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth; who for us men and our salvation descended, was incarnate, and was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and cometh to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost. Those who say: There was a time when He was not, and He was not before He was begotten; and that He was made out of nothing; or who maintain that He is of another hypostasis or another substance [than the Father], or that the Son of God is created, or mutable, or subject to change, [them] the Catholic Church anathematizes.
(Anathematize, for the record, comes straight from Greek, and literally means, “to set aside/suspend,” but for matters of the Church, it’s meant more directly as, “to exclude a sinner from the society of the faithful.” Let’s just say, it’s not exactly desirable to be declared “anathema.”)
So this original creed (from the Latin credo, meaning “I believe”) which we now refer to as the Nicene Creed (because it came from the Council of Nicea) obviously didn’t exactly have “elevator speech” written all over it, so it was later revised at the Council of Constantinople in 381. So I guess we should really call it the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, but you can probably understand why we just favor the brevity of “Nicene Creed.” Anyway, it’s this revised version we say today in Mass, and which we’ll dive further into in our next few posts.
Until then, Keep the Faith, man...
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