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The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The All of Life podcast, hosted by Nate Claiborne, provides weekly episodes that help further our mission to call, form, and send disciple-makers. At NewCity, we want to see Orlando flourish by filling it with people who say "Follow me as I follow Jesus in all of life."
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
Unpacking the Nicene Creed: Jesus Christ, Fully God and Fully Man with Michael Allen
In this episode, host Nate Claiborne and theologian-in-residence Dr. Michael Allen dive into the heart of the Nicene Creed—its second article, which focuses on Jesus Christ. Building on their previous conversation about the importance of creeds as both summaries and guardrails for Christian belief, they explore what the Creed affirms about Christ’s identity, nature, and redemptive work. From the theological poetry of “God from God, Light from Light” to the historical grounding in figures like Pontius Pilate and Mary, this central paragraph of the Creed brings into focus both the mystery and majesty of the eternal Son who took on flesh for our salvation.
Dr. Allen explains how the Creed combats ancient heresies like Arianism by affirming Jesus’ full divinity and eternal existence while also narrating his true humanity through the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The conversation emphasizes how these statements are not merely doctrinal assertions but pastoral and devotional aids for worship, especially relevant during Holy Week. As NewCity continues to recite the Creed weekly, this episode helps listeners reflect more deeply on what each phrase means, why it matters, and how it connects us to the global and historic church.
Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, Nate Claiborne, and once again I'm here with Michael Allen. How are we doing, Mike?
Speaker 2:I am still doing well, that's good. Shortly later, shortly later, yes.
Speaker 1:Well, if listeners remember, last week we gave a big picture introduction to the importance of creeds. We talked about how they help us as faithful guides and guardrails for interpreting scripture. They help us summarize what's important, focus in on the big ideas, but also guard against errors in interpretation. And we just barely started talking about Nicaea. At the end of it you gave us a really great historical context of how they even got to the Council of Nicaea, what was going on in the background, why that council was necessary, a little bit of some of the major players, athanasius, arius, and just the skirmish between them. But we left listeners. We left them wanting more because we didn't read the creed so much more.
Speaker 1:I know we know what we're doing here. We left the creed unsaid, although attentive listeners who attended New City would have recited it themselves just a few days ago, on Sunday, and so maybe it's still fresh in their mind. But even if it's not, I figured today we had said we would dive into the second article. People may or may not know what that actually means just off the top of their heads, so we're going to clarify what that means. But you said it'd be good if we start off just with a read through of the creed.
Speaker 1:Just to orient people that are listening. Maybe they don't have it right in front of them, yep.
Speaker 2:So the creed comes in three paragraphs or articles. Each begins with a statement of belief I, or we, believe in, and the first relates to the one God, the second to the Lord Jesus Christ, the third to the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. I'm going to read the second paragraph and folks who've been reciting it in worship or encountered it elsewhere will know this is the longest and that's because it's the one that's up for debate and conversation.
Speaker 2:It's the one that grave errors are being cited, so we want to explore some of that. Yeah, here's what it says. It says we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his 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. 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 Ghost or Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified, also for us, under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. The third day he rose again, according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God, the Father. He shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead. His kingdom shall have no end.
Speaker 2:Some of the words and phrases there are translated in slightly different ways and so people will perhaps remember a little differently here or think it sounds a little less familiar there. But hopefully the basic elements are clear enough and we wanted to talk about really two parts of this paragraph the central second paragraph about Jesus Christ about Jesus Christ. The first part of it, roughly half, is all about who he is, what he is, his identity, his nature. The second part is about his story, what happens to him and what he does, and we wanted to explore those two things. What each communicates, where it summarizes scripture, where it prioritizes or points to certain highlights, and where it does offer some warnings about grave errors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So even as you talk about that first part, let's kind of zoom in there, because that really is where there's language that, on the surface, maybe it doesn't seem that controversial to us now, 1700 years later, maybe because of how influential this creed has been through church history, maybe because we're just not aware of. Well, it's saying it like this because it's trying to rule out things that Arius was saying or things that needed to be clarified, so it's getting into a lot of metaphysical claims about who God the Son is. Can you help us double-click on some of those to kind?
Speaker 2:of see what's underneath. So you can observe some terms that appear again and again, and those are pretty telling, right? If the creed is written by a bunch of clergy who spend a lot of time teaching, then we could expect them to behave like teachers. Teachers try to repeat things that matter most, and so it is telling to observe some terms that appear again and again. And if you just look at the first half here, you're going to encounter words like God and Son. We're going to encounter words like begotten, and these are going to appear more than once. We're also going to see reference to two sorts of things to reference to what's eternal and reference to what is made or created, and that's going to become important. And that's going to become important.
Speaker 2:It's probably helpful to know a little bit more about Arius of Alexandria, who we talked about last time and against whom some warnings are sort of subtly directed here. Arius, as we said, he's pastoring. He's known as a devout Christian follower, loves his Bible, says a lot of things that would seem normal, but there are a few things that seem to really startle people, and over time, of course, people start to put these together a bit and it becomes clear that Arius believes that the Son, though he is loftier and more glorious than the average human, certainly than you or me he nonetheless is beneath or subordinate to God the Father. In a real sense, he's in sort of a middle class sort of state.
Speaker 2:He's an intermediate being. He's made of God, and he's made of God so as to make everything else for God's sake. And so he's. As you read in Colossians 1, he's the firstborn of all creation. Yeah, and Arius really takes that to say two things. One, he's born and you're born, and I'm born, and we know what it is to be born. It means you didn't exist, and then you do. And so arius will say very bluntly and regularly there was a time when he wasn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's like I think that's the key phrase, right, for yeah, this is the the thing that arius is doubling down on. Yeah, this phrase there was when he was not.
Speaker 2:And that's where the language of eternity therefore comes in so significantly in this paragraph as a rebuttal, saying no, no, no, the son is eternally existent and eternally divine, he's not a later creature. The creed also rebuts that with this language that he's begotten, yes, but he's not made. Whatever it means for him to be begotten as a son, which is admittedly mysterious, it can't be interpreted as him being made, like heaven and earth were made. It's the same word that appears in paragraph one to say that God is the maker of heaven and earth, the creator out of nothing of all that exists. And so the creed is trying to respond to Arius's claim that the son is a creature, even a highly regarded creature, and it's rebutting that by saying he's eternal and he's divine, he's God just as much as the Father is God. And that's where we encounter this beautiful poetry that's repeated here.
Speaker 2:The creed kind of toggles back and forth between philosophically precise language and these poetic pairings. So it'll say, yes, he's eternally begotten of the Father, which is precise language to oppose Arius. But then it'll say the same thing in just a moving, beautiful way. That means he's God from God, he's light from light, he's true God from true God. He is God as much as the Father is God. He's light as much as the Father is light. He's truly or fully God as much as the Father is fully God. But as the Son, he's God from and light from and truly God from the Father, who is God, light and truly God. So it's trying to affirm that he is named as the Son, not the Father. He really does flow forth from the father's being, but that can't be interpreted as at some point he gets made or given birth to, and this is where we've got to remember that the creed. It warns us against bad understandings. It doesn't mean to give us a fully satisfying answer that satisfies all our curiosities or removes all mystery.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, this might be a good point. We didn't talk about this in the first episode, but I figured this would be a good place to just a brief little sidebar of that's the difference between a creed, a confession or even a catechism. In my understanding, with the creed we're just confessing things we believe we're not necessarily explaining all the details of what these phrases mean, but something like Westminster or either the confession or the catechism. It's actually giving a lot more detailed explanation. Catechism is obviously in a question-answer format.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. Later, confessions and catechisms do, oftentimes not always, but oftentimes they say much more fully how we're to understand things that are only named here, and that's certainly true. This is meant to be a high-level summary, so when something gets named in detail and there are a couple things that are, that's meant to really point out to us how important they must be. So this here highlights how important understanding that the Son is eternal. It's not like he comes into being when Jesus is born of Mary. No, he's eternally the Son before he becomes incarnate by the miracle of the virgin birth. And it's not merely that he exists spiritually as a creature made by God. No, he's been God, just as the father has been God. He's been truly God, just as the Father's been truly God. He is eternal in the richest, fullest sense. He's divine, and so it really is signaling how important knowing his character is. I think in different areas of life that's something we intuitively appreciate.
Speaker 2:Elsewhere. You step into a situation. If you're going to a workplace, it's really important really quickly to size up who's the boss you know and then to size up, okay, who's the person with experience to whom everybody goes with their questions, figuring out those two people. Sometimes they're the same, but often they're not. That helps you know how people are going to behave and how you ought to relate to them, what they can do and how you ought to behave amongst them. You know you go to a sort of a restaurant or something. You want to quickly be able to differentiate who's there to eat, who's serving, who's cooking, who's delivering stuff. Everybody matters. Everybody's got importance. We're doing different things and we're going to relate to people in different ways. I don't want to bark my order out or even kindly request it from someone who's a fellow patron. Right, knowing who somebody is really matters for knowing what they can do and how they can impact others.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now that's really helpful, thinking of the different relations all within the same place. I think too, as you were mentioning, of the eternality. The creed doesn't say this in so many words, but there's a sense in which we've already affirmed certain things about the father. But in order for the father to be eternally the father, the son also has to be eternally the son. They kind of go together, don't they?
Speaker 2:They kind of do go together.
Speaker 1:They're very reciprocal. I know this isn't part of the larger discussion that maybe that Arius is bringing up, but it's interesting that if you really did want to double down on the claim that the son, there was a time when he was not and like, well, what was the fuck? Like, yeah, what was the father at that point?
Speaker 2:was he just generic god and then he became the father, that would be an implication of the son right coming into being yeah, and and this really does point to something that it's not just owing to the genre of the text, that the nature of the claim is mysterious, and explaining it only makes clear why it's mysterious. Heretics keep trying to make something make sense according to common sense. The creed, like other good teaching tools, points out God being triune is mysterious. It doesn't match anything else in our experience. Mysterious. It doesn't match anything else in our experience, strictly speaking, and therefore it does feel funny. It seems strange. That's because it's the only instance of it, just so, and so here, when we come to language that the son is just as eternal and divine as the father, but he's Son and he's begotten, not the begetter. That is strange, that is mysterious. That ought to register. It's also important to say all that comes from the Bible. It comes from texts like John 1 and John 5 and so forth. The Creed is trying to help us appreciate a mystery. The Bible itself says matters, but we need to realize it is something the Bible tells us matters and it matters as a mystery. It matters as being a unique instance, and we see that further when we turn to the second half of this paragraph, which I know we want to talk about now, the story of Christ.
Speaker 2:Here too, we can see how important it is to summarize. You know, john's gospel account ends with saying, if you said everything about Jesus, there wouldn't be enough books. And so therefore, picking your spots, deciding how to summarize, becomes really important, and this offers a compressed summary of key highlights. Misses a lot. If you're interested in sort of Jesus as a boat-faring character, this jumps over, as far as I can tell, all the episodes of Jesus in boats there's quite a few, but it highlights, spiritually and theologically, what the church believes is most important, describing everything from coming down from heaven, birth of a virgin, to suffering death, to resurrection, ascension and return and reign forevermore. It's a remarkably wide survey. Evermore. It's a remarkably wide survey. It helps us to keep the big picture in mind but not to get lost in all the myriad details of that big picture.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and it's also jumping from one mystery to the other, cause, you know, in the first first part we have the mystery of the Trinity, you know, god and God the father, god the son. How are they equal, yet distinct? And then now we've moved to, we're talking about Jesus and his story, and it's very clear okay, well, he's equal with God, but this sounds like a human who's born and lives and dies, and that's what other humans do, and so he's somehow 100% God and then also somehow 100% man, but in a way that the creed doesn't need to spell out the details or try to explain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we see that in the beginning of the transition. You know it doesn't begin by simply saying and on Christmas Day he was born. No, it starts with who, for our sakes, or for us and our salvation, depending on the translation he came down from heaven and was made incarnate or human. You couldn't say that of yourself. I can't say that of myself. We were just born on a particular day.
Speaker 2:This is describing somebody who already exists eternally and whose whole earthly story is the result of a choice. God has made A choice. Jesus, the Son, has shared in that. This incarnation, this taking human flesh and existence and nature in its totality. Hebrews 2 will say, like us, in every respect, that that's a choice. And it says why and again, this is from scripture I've come to seek and save the lost who, for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was made incarnate. And by the end of the story, of course, it says so much birth, suffering, death, resurrection. Then it describes ascension. He goes back up, and so it gives us this grand vision of the full swing where he has come down, he's taken on our life, he's experienced our death, he's risen anew by God's power and now he's taken our humanity up into the very presence of God. Yeah, so it really is this mysterious but grand, this glorious but life-giving sort of viewpoint of the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and along the way it anchors us in real history. I think it was. I first remember coming across this in Karl Barth, talking about the Apostles' Creed, which is a. I don't know if it's fair to say the Apostles' Creed is an earlier version of Nicene Creed, but it's structured similarly. It makes a lot of the same claims, very much so. Yeah, nicene is expanding on some of those claims, but it retains this casual reference to Pontius Pilate, who's in a few verses in the gospel but is at a very pivotal point in the story, and so this is a real historical person that we have records for elsewhere. And I think Barth's claim, or Barth's point that he was making, was that if, without something like that, it'd be easy to just say, well, the creeds, it's not that different than, like the myths about the Greco-Roman gods. It's this fanciful story that, yeah, it's a story, but it didn't really happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and this creed will make that point also by referring a couple times to things happening, also according to the scriptures, that there were foretellings of things to come, including a virgin birth. And it's interesting, the two human characters apart from Jesus who appear are the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They come off appropriately in very different ways, don't they? They represent different things. But Mary, here, there's so many things you could say about her example of faith. Servant of God. She points to the fact that God is fulfilling promises, that the Messiah would come through the Virgin, as foretold in Isaiah. Pilate, as you said, represents something very different, also foretold. There were warnings in the prophets as well, of his being one who suffers and it seems to suggest authorities will oppose him. But Pilate's dateable. He's a historic figure. This is something that signals something utterly evidentiary. It invites people to go look at non-Christian texts where you see the interaction of Jesus and Pilate as well, and so that's a really profound point. This is to be interpreted as fulfilling Israel's scriptures, but really landing in space and time in public history. That is not made up and is, in fact, documentable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is it is guarded against different types of threats. So you know, the first paragraph is this was a threat within the church of misinterpreting scripture, not taking into account the whole scope of scripture, the whole story of scripture. And then the second part of the creed is is I wouldn't say it's, I think it'd be unfair to say it's totally aimed outside the church, but it is looking outside the church to claims that are, uh, undermining the historicity of the gospel story, saying, well, you know, jesus didn't really die, didn't rise again, maybe it wasn't even a real person, and those sorts of claims they've cropped up, maybe from our perspective, more in a modern world, but they're not entirely modern.
Speaker 2:There's a long history of disputing, so you know, one thing we could take from this, as we sort of bring things full circle as people think about this, as we recite this regularly in worship. Hopefully, as it comes to mind from time to time, would be, on the one hand, as we think about this central paragraph in the middle, the longest it gets the most screens as things toggle through, prompting us in worship together, us in worship together. The second paragraph really points out the Son has to be who he is for Him to do what he does for us and what Scripture promises that the gospel offers us in His name. And so, as we think about the events remembered in Holy Week, as we think about the basic gospel story, from his birth all the way through, eventually at the end of time, to his return in glory and all the key moments in between, it's important to remember only one, who is eternally God and who's chosen for us and our salvation to come down and take on our humanity. Only that kind of being could do what we seem to hear is offered and done for us, and so the who precedes the what. The second thing we might keep in mind also is when it describes the story. It reminds us to keep our eye on the main things, yes, but all the main things, and it's so easy. We can sometimes be content to think just about the dark, the sad nature of Maundy Thursday or of Good Friday, the suffering on the cross, and that's a unique blessing. It's crucial, it's named here, it's elemental, but we need to also remember Easter's coming, and not just Easter, but then we're prompted to think ahead to ascension and the fact that he's enthroned on high, a human, the incarnate son, rules and reigns now at the right hand of the father, and, and even then there's return and glory yet to come. So it it does keep our eye on the main things, but we need to remember the main things are several.
Speaker 2:The story does involve key moments, and the the crucial thing is it helps us remember, um, that we want to appreciate and appropriate all those promises and blessings on the regular. We can savor one on this day, we can turn to another the next day. We want to make sure, though, that we're receiving and resting in the whole Christ, not just a favored or more familiar part, and so this gives us a feasible, a doable summary, but one that also presents a remarkable offering. That's not simply a single item or affirmation, but what Calvin calls the sum of the gospel, and so I hope that's something we can explore together. Which are the parts I tend to think of and what are the others? The Creed invites me more prayerfully and studiously and meditatively to explore in my Bible reading, as I listen to sermons and so forth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's very helpful to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:I think that's one of the reasons behind why we decided to just double down on reciting it every week, and it's my understanding that that's actually going to continue.
Speaker 1:And we started it this year because of the anniversary celebrations of the creed that sort of remind us that we're part of a larger story than our local PCA Presbytery or our local, you know, even just Florida or America. It's a lot larger than that of people who look back to this creed and recite it regularly and meditate and think about it. And so it's going to give us a chance, by having recited it every Sunday, to potentially have it memorized by the end of the year and to keep coming back to the different parts of it and thinking about implications. And we can put some resources into the show notes for people that really want to dig in further. And we've touched we've just touched on that one second paragraph, but even then we were very cursory in the ways that we pointed at certain things just to kind of dig in a little deeper. But every phrase has its own backstory and history and explanation of the significance that people would do well to think on and meditate and explore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the fact that we say it after a sermon and before we approach the table each week is not for nothing and it's meant to do something for everybody in the room. On the one hand, it's a reminder of the big picture that we all together trust in. Our services tend, of course, to focus on particular themes because they focus on particular texts. You can't do to focus on particular themes because they focus on particular texts. You can't do and focus on everything equally. And so if we're deep in Hebrews or Leviticus or Numbers, that means you're sometimes narrowing your vision just a touch to catch more there and to learn that, having the whole picture confessed in the creed, it reminds us also to keep our eye on what this is all about, and that's so good for all of us as believers, even folks who've been at it for decades. It reminds you of kind of the big picture that gives you balance.
Speaker 2:And then we want to remember, thankfully, and I think increasingly, we've got other people who aren't Christians Hopefully we can simply say aren't Christians yet. And they're there and they're curious, and it's good that they hear a scripture expounded in a sermon, that they hear words of welcome and warning before the table various prayers and so forth. It's also helpful for them to hear the big picture. And those of us who are going to officiate at the table will often say prior, when we tell unbaptized nonbelievers not to come and partake, we do say but turn to someone else and ask what it is they believe the creed tells them what they can ask about. It helps them know what it is. They believe. The creed tells them what they can ask about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it helps them know what the big picture is, that Christianity is not merely whatever a passage in Hebrews or Leviticus said, though it is that it's really this grand big thing, and so the creed is a great gift both to those of us who are trying to faithfully keep on the journey and to those we want to invite increasingly to know more and more of what it would involve and to welcome in to that journey of faith, and so it really does play a key role there for us as we gather in worship and hopefully, for each of us as we go about our lives throughout the week. Yeah, I'm so glad we could talk about it.
Speaker 1:I know, and I am as well, and hopefully, as we go about our lives throughout the week. Yeah, I'm so glad we could talk about it. I know, and I am as well, and hopefully, as we approach Easter this coming Sunday, that that'll, you know, just the reflections that we had here will help people think about these truths a little bit more and we'll have people in our midst on Easter Sunday who are there to hear what this is all about and we'll recite the Creed together and they'll learn a little bit more about what it means what Christians believe.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to it. That's great.
