True God from True God

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1. 0:00

   Fred Sanders

   It's great to be part of this team taking on the theology of the Creed of Nicaea. It's amazing to hang out a sign that says we're going to talk about Trinitarian theology this weekend and have hundreds and hundreds of people show up. I'm not just trying to flatter the audience so you'll like me — that's genuinely amazing. A positive sign. Will you join me in prayer as we start?

2. Fred Sanders

   This is a prayer from Hilary of Poitiers, a Latin pro-Nicene theologian: "O God, we wait for you to set in motion these timid first steps of ours, to confirm them so that we may make progress, and to call us into fellowship with the Spirit who guided the prophets and apostles, so that we may apprehend their words in no other sense than that in which they spoke them, and explain the proper meanings of the words according to the realities that they signify. For we will be speaking of the things that they proclaimed in mystery. Grant us therefore precision of words, light of understanding, honorable speech, and true faith. Enable us to believe that which we speak, so that we may confess you, one God and Father, and one Lord Jesus Christ, as taught by the prophets and apostles, and against the contradictions of the heretics, proclaim you as God, not solitary, and your Son as God, not falsely. In his name we pray. Amen."

3. 1:42

   Fred Sanders

   I get to do a fairly close reading of one phrase from the Nicene Creed. I'm going to put it in context and spend some time with it, because we're going to dig pretty deep into the heart of the heart of this theology — you could even say the heart of the heart of the heart. If the Nicene Creed successfully captures the heart of the Bible's message about who God is, and if the second article of the Nicene Creed is the heart of the Nicene Creed, and if this phrase, true God from true God, is the heart of the second article, then we're going to a strategic place.

4. Fred Sanders

   The phrase we're looking at, true God from true God, is not quite a Bible phrase in exactly this form. Most of the Nicene Creed is simply assembled from biblical materials, but true God from true God is Bible language with an extra spin on it to draw out something you might otherwise miss. We looked at John 17:3, where Jesus says, "This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." So we have this crucial phrase, true God, and it's Jesus talking to his Father and also including himself in the eternal life and knowledge that can be had, and tying it to this mission. We're going to see all of these elements reassembled in the Nicene Creed to draw out a point that's really only in the background in what Jesus says here.

5. 3:29

   Fred Sanders

   This phrase, and this part of the Nicene Creed, is new compared to previous creeds. So I want to compare the Nicene Creed of 381 to the Apostles' Creed, the other great candidate for the title of the Christian creed. We don't really know its birthday, or where it's from, or who put it together — we're pretty sure it's not the apostles, though the idea is that it contains the gist of the apostles' teaching. There's a pious medieval legend that all twelve apostles got together before leaving Jerusalem and each contributed a line — Thomas, apparently, got "I believe in the resurrection." It's a wonderful story. I'm pretty sure it's not true, but I wasn't there, so who knows.

6. Fred Sanders

   One of the wonderful things about the Apostles' Creed — and I want to praise it before I compare it to the Nicene Creed — is that it just bubbled up out of the church's life. Anyone who reads the whole Bible, thinks about the whole thing, and asks, "could you fit that on an index card?" is going to come up with something like this. Scholars call it the Old Roman Symbol, or a baptismal creed belonging to certain specifiable places. The creed is fairly simple: from a distance it has a Trinitarian outline — I believe in God the Father; then the middle section, the heart of it, and in Jesus Christ, where you get a recitation of the events of his life, mostly from the final week, boiled down radically to a basic narrative that brings out his identity as the Son of God. Then the third article, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. In praise of the Apostles' Creed, we could say it's centered on a story — very gospel-centered — and it wraps the Father and the Holy Spirit around that story. So there's a Trinitarian structure and a life-of-Jesus center. You can't really go wrong with it; it's a great creed.

7. 7:12

   Fred Sanders

   Here's one thing to say about the Apostles' Creed: in order to tell you who God is based on what God has done, it gives you three names — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It collects the three persons of the Trinity as it confesses faith in Jesus Christ. But it turns out that a sneaky, ornery non-Trinitarian in the congregation can say the Apostles' Creed without crossing their fingers behind their back, because nothing in it forces belief in the Trinity as such. They can say those are just Bible words, three main characters of the Bible, without it ever saying how they're related. The Apostles' Creed collects the persons of the Trinity but doesn't put much effort into connecting them.

8. Fred Sanders

   By the fourth century, the Nicene Creed has learned some specific problems it wants to intercept, so it wants to be more explicit. It's interesting that the Apostles' Creed is a baptismal creed for believers, while the Nicene Creed, as you know from its history, is a training creed for bishops — written for a higher level of understanding within the church. I want to show you the Nicene Creed now, a little longer, and zone in on what's new compared to the Apostles' Creed. But don't get tricked into thinking what's new is best — the old material is also here, and it's really good. Everything below what I'll call the Nicene line is a story of the life of Jesus, roughly the same data points as the Apostles' Creed picks out.

9. 9:52

   Fred Sanders

   What is all that material above that line? It's material about who this person is who does these things the creed recites. This is a section where the Nicene Creed, for reasons of contemporary heresy, has to carefully identify who it is who does these things. I call this the Nicene Line — I consider it the most important line in Christian theology. It separates the story of Jesus from the grounding truth of who the person of Jesus Christ is. In the Apostles' Creed, in simpler form, you get: we believe in his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ — titles taken from Scripture — and then you go straight into the narrative. The Nicene Creed knows there's trouble, and that it needs to introduce you to the character before he carries out his work. The preface to the narrative in the Nicene Creed introduces the character and grounds his identity — crucially, in deity and in his relation to the Father.

10. Fred Sanders

    The Nicene Line tells you a prologue in heaven: what it is to be God, who is God, and then what that person does. To tell the story you have to move horizontally, like a timeline; to identify the height and depth of who this person is, you have to go up. The Son of God becomes incarnate, does the work he does, is who he is for us, among us, for our salvation. But that horizontal line is intersected by a descending line, because the one who is eternally with God came down from heaven and did this. You need both — the Bible-reading skill of following the story, and the skill of stepping back to say we are dealing with a character who doesn't just live inside the story.

11. 13:14

    Fred Sanders

    If you start this story at Christmas, that's too late. If you start it nine months before Christmas, that's still too late. The Son of God preexists his work for us as Jesus Christ. The eternal life of the second person of the Trinity is older than the life of Jesus Christ incarnate. Here's the word, if you're taking notes: preexistence. It's an easy word to say but a mind-blowing thought to think, because he preexists his life among us in the flesh — not by a couple of days, not by a couple of weeks, not by a couple of thousand years. He preexists his incarnation infinitely, eternally. The Son of God is as much older than the incarnation as God is older than creation.

12. Fred Sanders

    So you're trying to think: how far back do I have to start this story? You have to start it before there are stories — when there is just God. This is the scope of what we're dealing with. The Nicene Creed comes in from all the way above and says: let me introduce you to the one who does this work. I know you already called him God the Father's Son, our Lord — but let me tell you who he is in greater detail.

13. 14:45

    Fred Sanders

    If there's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and Jesus does these things, what's the difference between the Father and the Son, and why is it the Son who becomes incarnate and carries out this work? How does that Son preexist? Athanasius has a great first run at the answer: the one through whom the Father remade creation is the one through whom the Father made creation in the first place. That's one of the theses running through Athanasius's book on the incarnation, and it's a beautiful, true argument — the same Word from the beginning is the Word who became flesh.

14. Fred Sanders

    The thing is, that doesn't reach far enough to get the whole job done, as I think Athanasius knew. You can't just say the one who saved us is the one who made us, because that's still all about us — you're still norming the identity of Jesus only by the story centered on creation and salvation. You have to go further. "The one through whom he first made the world" is a good answer, but it's inadequate — diagrammatically, it still falls below the Nicene Line. There's still something going on in the very life of God. When you get safely above the line, you'd say: God saved us through the one through whom he made the world, and through the one who is his Son. And that's the Nicene use of the word Son — a Bible word that Nicaea goes out of its way to define. It means something in the very life of God.

15. 16:39

    Fred Sanders

    Let me show you this middle part of the Nicene Creed — the prologue in heaven, the part of the second article, the Christology, that's above the line. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten. I'm using Mark DelCogliano's translation from the Greek, and in the Greek word order it goes: the Son of God, the only begotten. Most of us recite a version that goes, "I believe in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God" — a fine translation, but something is happening with the word order. It says Son of God, and then it says, in effect, nine different things that Son of God means — nine specifications of what calling Jesus the Son of God means, according to Scripture.

16. Fred Sanders

    So I put "Son of God" with a colon after it, and the first thing it wants to say is that he is the only begotten. Could we just admire the outline here — Son, and then a bullet-pointed list of exactly what that means? It's practically beating you over the head with the definition of Son.

17. 18:10

    Fred Sanders

    First, only begotten. Minimally, this is the Greek word monogenes, which John uses five times — minimally it means the unique Son, the only Son of his kind. You could read monogenes as mono, one, and genēs sounding something like generic — unique, one of a kind. This is reflected in calling Jesus the Son: as the Heidelberg Catechism points out, all of us are sons and daughters of God by faith, but this one is the Son, the unique Son, the Son of his love, his only Son.

18. 18:54

    Fred Sanders

    Second: he was begotten. This is the word begotten by itself, meaning that he has proceeded forth from the Father within the life of God — there is the Father and the Son, and the relation between them is that the Son is from the Father. If you want to play conservative with biblical language, you could say the Bible clearly says there's Father and there's Son but doesn't tell us the relation between them. The Nicene Fathers would ask: how do the names Father and Son not tell you the relation? If you turn the nouns into verbs, the Father Fathers the Son and the Son is... well, those aren't words, so we go with beget.

19. Fred Sanders

    In contemporary English, beget really just means to come from a male parent, and it's basically quit functioning as a word in our language — if I say beget, I'm either doing Old Testament genealogies or Trinitarian theology. It's an aside, but it can't be a healthy indicator of our culture's life that we don't have a good word for how you come from a father. With a racehorse you can say sired; I can say I father my children, but that sounds more like my parenting style. So when people hear "the eternal begetting of the Son" and it sounds weird, it's partly because we've lost a word in our language.

20. Fred Sanders

    Because he's begotten, I think "only begotten" should indeed be translated only begotten — it says they believe in the Son, the only begotten, who is begotten from the Father. Monogenes in that first point doesn't mean only unique by itself; it also carries the idea of coming forth from, which the Creed goes on to specify using a slightly different Greek word. Sometimes we talk about the doctrine of eternal generation — an attempt to open another channel for thinking about the Son being from the Father. When I tell you the Son was begotten from the Father, you might ask: begotten from where, and begotten from when? The answer to where is the Father — I can't locate him on a GPS system, but that's the ultimate theological answer. The answer to when is before all ages. Some translations say before all worlds. The point is the Son is from the Father before any of those ages — a long way of saying eternal. As Gregory of Nazianzus puts it: if you ask me when the Son was begotten, the answer is, before when.

21. 22:52

    Fred Sanders

    Then we get to the next phrase: light from light. This plays on the fact that God is light and in him is no darkness at all, and that Jesus is the light of the world — it confesses a divine perfection, a divine attribute, and puts the relationship inside of it. One other place this might refer to in Scripture is where Hebrews calls the Son the radiance of the Father's glory. The Nicene Creed says this revealed image of God as light has within it the Father-Son relation. From 1 John 1:5, God is light; the Son is light from light.

22. Fred Sanders

    This brings us to our key phrase, true God from true God — which I'll unpack in greater detail — but briefly: this is true God, really God, the divine essence, Godness, and the relation, both together. Not just naming a divine attribute, but upping the register to God, the very Godness of God — true God, not semi-God or demi-God, but true God. And then this great negation: begotten, not made.

23. 25:06

    Fred Sanders

    This is a definition of begotten mainly by distinction — if I say the Son is begotten and you say that sounds created, I reply: no, begotten, not created. I may not have given an airtight argument for why these aren't the same thing, but the Creed asserts, definitionally, that when the Son is described as begotten, the antithesis of creation is intended. There are apparently a couple of ways to come from God: one is to be his eternal only begotten Son, and another is to be any creature. We're all from God in some sense, but the Son is from God in this unique sense — begotten, not made.

24. 25:53

    Fred Sanders

    And then this most controversial word, in Nicaea in 325 as well as in 381: the same in substance with the Father, homoousios, of one substance. There is one divine being, and the Father and the Son both have that numerically same divine being. They don't have different versions of it, or variations on it — these are not two instances of God made from the same stuff. It's the one Godness that is God. The Father has and is that Godness; the Son has and is that Godness.

25. Fred Sanders

    There's a ninth answer or specification of sonship — through whom all things came into being — but I've put it below the Nicene Line, because the main structure the line gives to Christian theology is to distinguish the history of salvation, Jesus Christ incarnate among us, from the eternal preexistence of the Son. To think that through and draw a clear line so you can tell who the agent is in the gospel story, you have to think very big and say that creation itself, and all movements of God toward creation, are below the Nicene Line, because there's nothing above that line except God. To put sonship above that line is to confess, in this highly elaborate, carefully thought-out way, that the Son is fully God.

26. 27:31

    Fred Sanders

    I want to dig in a little closer on our key term and show you why, even though it's not the star of Nicaea — the star is homoousios, the word people fought about most, the one much has been written on — I think this phrase, true God from true God, actually has more synthetic, systematic power.

27. Fred Sanders

    The Christological material above the Nicene Line begins with the Son being begotten, specified in several ways, and ends with the statement that he is of the same substance. That's the scope of the material, and a lot happens in between. If you mark begotten and same substance, you can see: the same substance is one color and the relation is another. We confess homoousios — the Son with the Father, of one substance, consubstantial. What that means is that the truth of true God is opened up, and within it we see the confession of begottenness. True God from true God means that within the reality of God, there is this relation between these two. I think the phrase true God from true God really sums up the overall theology — the total scope of the confession and specification of the Son's identity in the Nicene Creed.

28. Fred Sanders

    We recognize the formula from light from light — algebraically, x from x. One scholar has called this the x from x formula, and the versions that made it into the Nicene Creed are God from God, true God from true God, light from light. But there were other versions floating around the fourth century as councils tried to figure out why the Arians wouldn't go away. A confession from 341 has the Son as whole from whole, soul from soul, perfect from perfect, King from King, Lord from Lord — great outtakes from the Nicene Creed, deleted scenes just as good as the rest. I could put almost any divine attribute into that formula and be confessing the one substance of God and the relation between Father and Son.

29. Fred Sanders

    The fact that these formulas were floating around through the fourth century, and what we get in the Nicene Creed of 381 is a disciplined, restrained version of it, tells you to weigh every word of the Creed carefully. Every one of those nine specifications is an attempt to exclude heretical misinterpretations and sharpen the mind on the identity of the Son. That's basically what x from x means — an algebraic formula for the relation of Son from Father. Whatever you replace the x with, it's always going to mean Son and Father, because of that fromness. The true God who is from the true God is the Son; the true God from whom the true God is, is the Father. The x from x formula is a confession of the Father and Son using alternative biblical imagery and expressing the relation at the heart of the consubstantiality. From is a huge word here.

30. Fred Sanders

    If we ask who is the Son, who is the one who is our Savior, the Nicene Line has taught us that no answer measured only by finite created things will do. You could try to praise him very highly by saying his identity is that he's the one who made the universe — and Nicene thought would say you think you're praising him highly, but you're actually condemning him with faint praise, because his identity can only be defined by looking to his relation to the Father. Creating the universe is too small a thing to define his identity. You've got to recognize that the main thing about the identity of the Son is the Father, and that relation, that from, is what gives you everything — within the perfect, infinite unity of the divine being.

31. 34:10

    Fred Sanders

    This is how the Nicene Creed rehearses it: the Son of God — and then it hammers what it means by Son. The only begotten, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, the same in substance with the Father. Everything else spins out of that identity — that he came down from heaven and was made man for us and our salvation. That's the other thing you could write below the Nicene Line: for us and our salvation. "For us" includes creation — he made us, and then we needed saving, so he saved us. But all of that turns toward us.

32. Fred Sanders

    Below the Nicene Line is any interaction in created reality that is for us and our salvation. That's important to us — we're talking about the gospel itself. But there's something bigger than the gospel. I'm a warm-hearted evangelical, and I'm not in the business of diminishing the gospel — but compared to the eternal identity of the second person of the Trinity himself, who would have been himself even if there were no gospel, no fall to redeem anyone from, no creatures to redeem — he is just that much larger. The life of God is that much greater even than the entire project of creation and its restoration in Christ.

33. Fred Sanders

    Things you want to keep below the line, as elements of the faithful project of creation and redemption rather than of the eternal identity of the Son, include delegated craftsmanship. It is the case that the Father made everything through the Son, but at that point you've already crossed over into God's relations with the outer world. You don't want to take delegated craftsmanship, or creaturehood, and push it above the line. If you're trying to answer, what is the difference between the Father and the Son, and you say, the Father's not a creature but the Son is — that's what really got Athanasius's goat. If you're saying the difference ontologically between Father and Son is that the Son is a creature by nature, you've demoted him from deity. He comes all the way down from heaven, crosses the creator-creature distinction without abolishing it, takes his stand among us in the lowliness of the flesh — and to say that's who he is by nature is supremely insulting. That's taking the elements of his condescension and making them his identity, when they're really the depth from which he descended.

34. 37:43

    Fred Sanders

    Creaturehood, humanness, delegated authority of any kind, and even submission to commands — these have their place in the relation of the incarnate Son of God, according to his human nature, to the Father who sent him. But they don't belong above the Nicene Line. If you're trying to answer what the difference is between the Father and the Son, and you come up with, the Son eternally obeys the Father — that's taking something from below the Nicene Line and porting it up above the line to try to answer the question of the eternal Son's identity, and it doesn't belong there. There are variations and grades of error here, but to move that relation of authority, submission, and command of one will to another above the line is a serious error. What is above the line has to be fully God. When you ask the Nicene Creed what belongs above the line, the answer is short and clear: Son — not in any random sense, but in the specified sense the Creed goes out of its way to define.

35. 41:11

    Fred Sanders

    These are two images from Ravenna, Italy, and part of my own story of how I became a theologian. I was an art major in college, drawing and printmaking, and I took a medieval art class and studied these fifth-century mosaics from Ravenna — round or hexagonal domed baptisteries decorated with tiles of colored glass, gold, and semi-precious stones, brilliantly arranged in both cases to portray the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Ravenna has two baptisteries less than half a mile apart. One is the Orthodox baptistery, known as the Neonian Baptistery; the other is the Arian Baptistery.

36. Fred Sanders

    How they got there, and why they're still standing, got my attention as an undergraduate — how could you be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and look up into the dome and see the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan and think, yes, this is the eternal Son of God, true God from true God, who for us and our salvation became incarnate — or, alternately, look up and think, yes, there is the greatest creature who took on flesh for us. These are radically different theologies, totally different doctrines of who the Son is, and yet the two baptisteries had the same decorative program.

37. Fred Sanders

    I got obsessed with this and started reading — Athanasius, nineteenth-century commentators on Athanasius. The semester ended and I had to turn in a paper, and it was inconclusive. Later I read a dissertation by a German scholar that had studied everything, and it was also inconclusive. How can you have radically different theologies of the incarnation but use the same image to decorate a baptistery? The basic answer is that the grammar of visual communication is very loose. You can point to a picture and say, that's Jesus — but that isn't specific enough to distinguish between radically different understandings of who Jesus is.

38. 44:05

    Fred Sanders

    The two mosaics are half a mile apart, but they're actually an infinity apart. The one usually shown on the left is the older, Orthodox one; the one on the right — which I admit I prefer for its cartooniness — is the Arian one. The old man standing in the water isn't God the Father; it's a personification of the Jordan River pouring out a jug of itself. As I said, the grammar of visual communication is loose. Pointing to someone and saying, that's the one I'm trusting for salvation, may do to pick somebody out of a crowd, but as soon as anyone raises a misunderstanding, you'll have to do more than point.

39. Fred Sanders

    You're going to have to use your words, as we tell children — because the pictures won't make the distinction you need. Bring out the words, bring out the Nicene words, and carefully describe who this character is. Even if we agree about the kind of thing he does, even if we tell the Jesus story with the same selected episodes, we haven't safely specified the identity of our Savior until we identify him as the Son of God in the Nicene sense — that he is true God of true God. Pointing is not enough. Or I could say: point better — point not with your finger at an image, or your hand at the story of the Bible, but point with concepts, arguments, and with faith that has sought understanding — faith that has confessed, "you are the Christ, the Son of the living God," and knows what it means by what it says.

40. 46:30

    Fred Sanders

    I'm going to close with a prayer from John Newton. Will you join me? "Father God, on what has now been sown, thy blessing now bestow. The power is thine alone to make it sprout and grow. Do thou in grace the hearers raise, and thou alone shalt have the praise. To thee our wants are known, from thee are all our powers. Accept what is thine own, and pardon what is ours. Our praises, Lord, and prayers receive, and to thy word a blessing give. In Jesus' name, amen."