Resurrection and life to come (Nicene Creed #13)

This post concludes our series examining the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (commonly referred to as the Nicene Creed). For other posts in the series, click a number: 1, 2, 3, 4 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 12.

We are examining the Creed's final clause:

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Last time we addressed one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Now we'll address the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Note that the Creed links the resurrection with forgiveness of sins. As noted by Thomas F. (T.F.) Torrance (in The Trinitarian Faith), this linkage was of particular importance to the Creed's framers, "for it meant that forgiveness was not in word only but enacted in the concrete reality of human physical existence" (p298).

This linkage also served to expose certain heresies that denied that the Word of God really did become flesh, and really did die and then rise from the dead in flesh (bodily), remaining forever fully God and fully human (now a glorified human). T.F. explains:

In his incarnate life, death and resurrection the Son of God established a binding relation between his divine reality an humankind; he not only bridged the gap between the creature and the Creator but triumphed completely over the separation between man and God due to human sin and alienation. The resurrection of  Christ demonstrated the fact that all division between man and God has now been removed in atoning reconciliation through the blood of Christ. Moreover, the resurrection of Christ in body demonstrated that the saving work of Christ on our behalf was fulfilled within the concrete reality of our actual human existence, and in such a way as to set it upon an entirely new basis in the regeneration or renewal of human being in the risen Lord. That was the great message of forgiveness proclaimed at once by the apostles on the day of Pentecost and sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit in baptism.

To be united to the crucified and risen Christ through the baptism of his Spirit , necessarily carries with it sharing with him in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. 'Our resurrection is stored up in the Cross,' as Athanasius once expressed it. Through his incarnation the Son of God took up into himself our physical existence enslaved to sin, thereby making our corruption , death and judgment his own and offering  himself as a substitute for us, so that through the atoning sacrifice of his own life, he might destroy the power that corruption and death have over us. Through the resurrection of our physical human nature in himself Christ has set us upon an altogether different basis in relation to God in which there is no longer any place for corruption and death. 'Now that the Savior is risen in his body, death is no longer terrible; for all who believe in Christ trample over it as if it were nothing, and choose rather to die than deny their faith in Christ. They know that when they die, they are not lost, but live and become incorruptible through the resurrection. Thus the central focus of Christian belief is upon the incarnate, crucified and risen Savior, for he has burst the bands of death and brought life and immortality to light - that is the forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the dead into which we are once for all baptized by the Holy Spirit. Far from being just a promise for the future, it is an evangelical declaration of what had already taken place in Christ, and in him continues as a permanent triumphant reality throughout the whole course of time to its consummation, when Christ will return with glory to judge the quick and the dead, and unveil the great regeneration which he has accomplished for the whole creation of visible and invisible realities alike (pp298-9).

Conclusion 
And so we have come to the end of this 13-part series. The emphasis throughout has been on our triune God - the one who in being and activity is one in three and three in one. T.F. comments:

For there is from the Father one grace which is fulfilled through the Son and in the Holy Spirit; and there is one divine nature and one God "who is over all and through all and in all" (quoting Athanasius who quotes Ephesians 4:6) (p307).

Let's conclude with the prayer offered by T.F. at the end of his book (p340):

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast revealed thyself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and dost ever live and reign in the perfect unity of love: Grant that we may always hold firmly and joyfully to this faith, and, living in the praise of thy divine majesty, may finally be one in thee; who art three Persons in one God, world without end.

Amen.

One baptism (Nicene Creed #12)

In this post we continue looking at the marks (identifying characteristics) of the Church as defined by the Nicene Creed. For other posts in this series, click a number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13.

We come now to the final clause of the Creed:

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

In this post, we'll address the first part, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

One baptism
The framers of the Creed apparently took the phrase one baptism from Paul's letter to the church in Ephesus (Eph 4:4-5). Paul exhorts that congregation to a unity grounded firmly in the fact that there is but "one body and one Spirit...one Lord, one faith [and], one baptism."

Why do Paul and the Creed highlight baptism but not the Eucharist? According to Thomas F. Torrance (in The Trinitarian Faith), it is because of the important "inner connection between baptism and the wholeness of the apostolic and catholic faith." Indeed, "the whole substance of the Gospel of grace...[is] concentrated in one baptism for the remission of sins" (p290). In making this point, T.F. references Athanasius' understanding that the "fullness of the mystery" (the gospel) is found in baptism, which "is given in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit" (p290). Like other early church fathers, Athanasius regarded baptism as....

...The great seal... the all-embracing sacrament bound up with one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, and one God and Father while the Eucharist was regarded as celebrated only within the Church's participation in the great mystery of baptism and as properly included within it (p. 290).

One baptism thus points directly to Jesus as the one Lord of the church. Indeed, it was through Jesus' vicarious life, death and resurrection that the church came into being. According to T.F., "baptism in his name signified incorporation of the baptized into Christ as members of his Body" (p291).

T.F. then shows that one baptism also points to the Holy Spirit...

For it is in one Spirit as well as through Christ that the Church has access to the Father. It is through the koinonia [communion/fellowship] of the Holy Spirit that the Church shares in the incarnate mystery of Christ, and through the power and operation within it that the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ is progressively actualized among the people of God. The Church is thus respected as the Temple of God in which he dwells through his Spirit (p291).

For the forgiveness of sins
Why does the Creed declare one baptism for the forgiveness of sins? Does baptism bring about that forgiveness? Torrance answers that "baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit initiates people into the sphere in which all the divine blessings [including forgiveness of sins]...are bestowed and become effective" (p292). In saying this, Torrance is not suggesting that we are forgiven (and thus saved) by baptism (or at the time of baptism). Rather he is noting that in the rite of baptism we experience subjectively (personally) all that Jesus accomplished for humanity objectively, including what he accomplished through his baptism in the Jordan. What is true objectively, becomes personally experienced (or actualized) in our baptism. It's one thing to be forgiven, it's another to experience that forgiveness, and thus have it become effective in our personal lives.

But what is personally (subjectively) experienced is grounded in a greater objective reality. It is to this reality that Torrance points. In doing so he notes that Athanasius (like other of the Greek church fathers) regarded Jesus' baptism as a vicarious baptism, which was "a decisive point" for all humanity. Torrance explains:

In his baptism in the Jordan, the incarnate Son of God received the Spirit upon the humanity he had taken from us, not for his own sake, but for our sake. That is to say, it was our humanity that was baptized, anointed, sanctified and sealed in him. Thus when he was baptized for us we were baptized in him. Our baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity, therefore, is to be understood as a partaking through the Spirit in the one unrepeatable baptism of Christ which he underwent, not just in the Jordan river, but throughout his life and in his death [and] resurrection on our behalf. That vicarious baptism was the objective truth behind the one baptism of the Creed in which its depth of meaning was grounded....We are [thus] directed through the rite of baptism to its objective ground and reality, [which is] Christ clothed with the saving truth of his vicarious life, death and resurrection (pp292-3). 

T.F. continues:

Baptism is the sacrament of that reconciling and atoning exchange in the incarnate Savior. When we understand baptism in that objective depth, we are directed away from ourselves to what took place in Christ in God (p293).

Thus we understand that it is the objective sense of baptism that is addressed in the Creed's declaration of one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. This phrase then points to the Creed's related phrase concerning eschatology: the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. We will address this when we next pick up this series on the Nicene Creed.

For a related Surprising God blog post on Gospel-Centered baptism click here.

The Story of God: Our journey

As Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films, is fond of saying, "Tell me a fact and I'll learn; tell me the truth and I'll believe; but tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever."

How true (as every good teacher knows). Jesus, the Master Teacher, often made his point with a story. His stories pointed people to the greatest story of all: The Story of God.

At the center of this story is Jesus who, as Andrew Purves notes,"is the mediating center of revelation, whereby all of our knowledge of God is controlled" ("The Shape of Torrance Theology," Theology in Scotland, vol XVI, p26).

Because Jesus, who reveals God as God, has united himself to all humans through the Incarnation, his story is the story of all humankind. Our history is his-story.

The story of Jesus as our representative and substitute, is the gospel. This story encompasses creation, fall, re-creation (redemption), leading to humanity glorified and dwelling with God in a new heaven and new earth. This story thus tells of an unfolding journey - not one merely facilitated by God on our behalf, but one of God-with-us (through Christ, in the Spirit).

Some (nonbelievers) journey with God quite unknowingly. Others (believers) journey knowingly and (as sung by Michael Card) experiencing "joy in the journey." May that joy (the joy of Jesus himself, given to us through the Spirit), be yours.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, 

so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

(Romans 15:13, NRSV)

The church's apostolicity (Nicene Creed #11)

This post continues our examination of the marks (identifying characteristics) of the Church as defined by the Nicene Creed. For other posts in this series, click a number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13.

We come now to the church's apostolicity, which Thomas F. Torrance (in The Trinitarian Faith) defines as follows:

In its simplest sense the apostolicity of the Church refers back to the original foundation of the Church once for all laid by Christ upon the apostles, but it also refers to the interpenetration of the existence and mission of the Church in its unswerving fidelity to that apostolic foundation (p285).

The Apostles were chosen and sent by Christ as a link between himself and the church. They would be this link by both teaching and embodying the truth of the Gospel (the deposit of faith), which is "the unrepeatable foundation on which the Church was built" (p286). This deposit includes the content of the Gospel found in the Apostles' writings (the New Testament, which points back to, and thus includes and interprets the Old Testament). However, this deposit is more than information on a page, for the Gospel itself points directly to the life-giving reality of Christ himself. This is vital to understand, for as Torrance notes:

It is only in Christ and not out of itself, and only through union and communion with Christ in its faith and mission and not through its own piety, that the Church is continuously sustained....That the Church is apostolic as well as one, holy and catholic, signifies, therefore, that it is ever one and the same with the Church once for all founded by Christ in the apostolate... That is to say, apostolicity has to do with the continuing identity of the Church as the authentic Body of Christ in space and time (p287).

To be truly apostolic in both its belief and ministry, the church must focus continuously and faithfully on the interpretation, exposition and application of Holy Scripture, which contains the apostolic witness to Christ...

...For it is through faithful transmission of the preaching and teaching of the apostles that the Church is itself constantly renewed and reconstituted as Christ's Church (p287).

The bishops and theologians of the Church who assembled at Nicaea grounded their deliberations in careful exposition of Scripture, even though, at times, they had to coin new terms to adequately express and thus faithfully convey the deposit of faith contained in Scripture. This was particularly needful in formulating statements concerning the triunity of God and the Incarnation of the Son of God. According to Torrance:

[The bishops and theologians attending the Council] were concerned in wrestling with the Holy Scriptures to express what they were compelled to think and hold within the context of the apostolic tradition under the impact of God's self-revelation through the Word and Spirit of Christ, and on that basis alone, to confess their faith in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And thereby they sought to provide continuing generations of people in the Church with an evangelical and apostolic framework within which continuing interpretation of Holy Scripture, proclamation of the truth of the Gospel, and instruction in the faith could be carried out (p289).

We are richly blessed to have inherited this "evangelical and apostolic framework," which defines and thus defends the deposit of faith once and for all given to the church by Jesus through his Apostles. By remaining true to this framework, the Church remains connected to Christ himself, who is the one Apostle in the absolute sense. That connection includes faithfully reading, understanding and teaching the deposit of faith given in Holy Scripture, and it includes faithful participation with Christ in his ongoing apostolic mission to the world, through his body, the Church.

The Creed's declaration of the church's apostolicity provides the basis for its concluding statement concerning the church's one baptism and issues pertaining to eschatology (the resurrection and the life to come). We will look at one baptism when next we return to this series.

The Mission of God: The Bible's grand narrative

In The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (IVP 2006), Christopher Wright leads us on a journey through the Bible using a "missiological hermeneutic." Concerning this journey, he asks...

Is it possible, is it legitimate, is it helpful for Christians to read the whole Bible from the angle of mission?  The immediate challenge that bounced back was: it all depends on whose mission you mean. If by "mission" we are thinking of "missions," and the great and laudable efforts of cross cultural missionaries, then we would be struggling to defend an affirmative answer to the first question. While our human missionary endeavor can find ample justification and explicit textual imperative in the Bible, it would be a distorted and exaggerated hermeneutic, in my view, that tried to argue that the whole Bible was "about" mission in the narrowly defined sense of human missionary activities.

He continues:

The Bible renders and reveals to us the God whose creative and redemptive work is permeated from beginning to end with God's own great mission, his purposeful, sovereign intentionality. All mission or missions which we initiate, or into which we invest our own vocation, gifts and energies, flow from the prior and larger reality of the mission of God. God is on a mission, and we, in that wonderful phrase of Paul, are "co-workers with God."

Wright demonstrates that throughout Scripture, God reveals himself as the God whose driving purpose is that humanity have with him a knowing relationship. The consistency and universality of this message throughout Scripture is striking. For example, in the Old Testament...

Yahweh presents himself as the God who will to be known. This self-communicating drive is involved in everything God does in creation, revelation, salvation and judgment. Human beings therefore are summoned to know Yahweh as God, on the clear assumption that they can know him and that God wills that they should know him.

Wright presents the Bible as constituting the revelation of this mission of God. Furthermore, as we embrace this revelation, we have in our possession the hermeneutical key that unlocks the Bible's purpose as a grand narrative that gives shape to a biblical, God-centered worldview.

For Wright, this grand narrative stretches from creation to new creation, and accounts for everything in between. It is The Story that tells where we have come from, how we got here, who we are, why the world is in the mess it is, how it can be (and has been) changed, and where we ultimately are going. It is the story of the mission of God revealed to us in Scripture as Father, Son and Spirit. It is the story demonstrating that the mission of this triune God is the heartbeat of all reality: all creation, all history and all that lies ahead.

Wright then notes that this biblical, missional worldview is disturbingly subversive in that it relativizes our place in the grand scheme of things. We tend to ask, "Where does God fit into the story of my life?" But the real question is, "Where does my little life fit into the great story of God's mission?" We tend to want a purpose that has been tailored just right for our individual life. But a biblical worldview sees our life's purpose as wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole of creation. We tend to argue about what the church's mission should be. But the real question is this: "What kind of church has God formed for his mission to the world?"

Sometimes our motivations for mission are inconsistent with the Bible's grand narrative. We tend to want numerical results ("nickels and noses"), emotional highs, amazing experiences, or personal respect and fulfillment. However, when our worldview is shaped by the revelation of who God is and what he is doing on mission to the world, then we see ourselves as part of what he is doing to call all people to himself, When our identity is conformed to this reality, then we are able to act in harmony with God's design as co-workers with him in his mission to all humanity.

For a more detailed review of this helpful book, click here.