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Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father”

February 3, 2011 in Lord Teach Us, Prayer, Theology as Life, Trinity with 1 Comment

As I read through Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life I plan to share select quotes and some quick thoughts as I make my way through this (short) book. To follow the series as it develops, click here.

This first chapter focuses on the phrase “Our Father,” with a specific emphasis on the communal aspect of opening the prayer with “Our”:

Some people are offended that we are taught to address God as Father. The greater offense may be the little word Our. In this prayer we are taught to pray, not as individuals, but as the church.

When we speak of God as “Father,” we are not talking about the way each of us has a biological father. Rather we are saying that, through Christ, all biological fatherhood is relativized by our lifelong learning that God alone is our true Father. We do not call God “Father” because we have had certain positive experiences with our biological fathers and therefore project those experiences upon God. Rather all human fathers are measured, judged, and fall short on the basis of our experiences of God as Father.

God is the Father. Family is the church. Christianity teaches us to look beyond our families and see our membership, through baptism, in the family that has been evoked from all families, nations, races, and cultures-the church.

In this chapter the authors begin to make their case that Christianity requires a complete shift of perspective. Do you think their emphasis on our “new family” is too strong?

The Person of Christ in the Councils

November 4, 2010 in Theology, Theology as Life, Trinity with 0 Comments

Of the five major Church Councils that address the Person of Christ, only one (Nicea) was concerned with defending his Deity. The other four were primarily defending the fact that he was actually human. This is very interesting today. Few deny that Jesus of Nazareth existed, it is dealing with his claims of Deity that make things difficult.

In case you are interested:

1. The Council of Nicaea in AD 325: Affirmed that Jesus Christ is truly God, in an affirmation of faith against the Arians.

2. The Council of Constantinople in AD 381: Affirmed that Jesus Christ was perfectly Man, against the Appollinarians whose teaching impaired the perfect humanity of Christ.

3. The Council of Ephesus in AD 431: Affirmed that Jesus Christ is one Person, against the Nestorians who divided Christ into two persons.

4. The Council of Chalcedon in AD 451: Affirmed that in Jesus Christ there are two distinct natures in one Person, and that in the one Person of Christ they were hypostatically united unconfusedly, incovertibly, indivisibly, and inseparably. This was affirmed against the Eutychians and Monophysites.

5. The Council of Constantinople in AD 680: Asserted that Jesus Christ possessed a human will as well as a divine will, against the Monethelites who asserted that in Jesus Christ there was only one single will.

Further Resources:

RTS on iTunesU – Systematic Theology III (lectures on Patristic Christology)

Contradiction, Paradox and Mystery

September 5, 2010 in Coram Deo, Theology, Theology as Life, Trinity with 0 Comments

Part of my new job as a teacher is teaching (go figure) a 12th grade Theological Foundations and Apologetics class. We are starting out the year working through several books, articles and teachings on the Trinity. In many of these readings (from within the church and without) there is a great deal of reference to contradiction, paradox and mystery. Here is a great summary of the distinction between Contradiction, Paradox and Mystery:

  1. Contradiction – something that defies the laws of logic and therefore is inherently unintelligible.
  2. Paradox – something that sounds contradictory, but upon closer scrutiny the tension is resolved.
  3. Mystery – things that we as yet do not understand. R.C. Sproul elaborates by saying that these are things “we believe to be true, but we don’t understand how or why it is that they are true.”

Using the Trinity as an example, it appears that a contradiction exists. How can God be both One and Three? A more than surface-level look at the Doctrine of the Trinity reveals that we believe that God is not One in precisely the same way He is Three. Does this leave room for Mystery and Paradox from a finite human standpoint? Yes. Is it a contradiction? No.