Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
19th of May, 2019
The Apostles Creed: Jesus Christ
I have mentioned before that the ecumenical creeds were written to answer particular questions. Last week we looked at some of the questions that the first clause of the Apostles Creed answers: do Christians worship the same God as Jews?; is the Father of Jesus Christ also the Creator of the cosmos? (Just to remind you, the early church answered both those questions with ‘yes’.) Today we look at the longest section of the Apostles Creed, the clause that is answering the question: ‘who is Jesus Christ’? One of the accusations that the early Christians were responding to in their creeds was that they worshipped more than one god, despite claiming to be monotheists. The world in which they lived was a world of many gods. Greeks and Romans were happy to believe that there was one Supreme Being, but they thought that the Supreme Being did not concern itself with daily life. Instead, it delegated the day-to-day running of things to lesser gods, and the Roman Empire only survived because these lesser gods were kept happy. The first Christians were accused of being atheists because they refused to join in traditional cultic celebrations. Other peoples in the Roman Empire had long known of and respected the Jews as monotheists, worshippers of a single God, and Christians claimed to be the same, despite proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord. As a pagan, Celsus, wrote of the early Christians:
If these men worshipped no other God but one, perhaps they would have a valid argument against the others. But in fact they worship to an extravagant degree this man who appeared recently, and yet think it not inconsistent with monotheism if they also worship his servant.[1]
It was partly to answer this accusation, that Christians worship two gods, that the clauses of the creeds to do with Jesus were written. Continue reading
