Jesus Wars 2 -- The War of Two Natures

Our small group continues to read Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins. See my post on the introduction and first chapter here.
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1. After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham.

I have argued for #1 for the last 25 years. If we don't have some faith that God was directing the final outcomes, Christian orthodoxy falls apart. We like to think that the Bible is obvious on all these things, but history tells a different story.

Every party in the debates over the Trinity and the nature of Christ was arguing from Scripture. Arius argued from Scripture. Athanasius argued from Scripture. Paul of Samosata argued from Scripture. Cyril argued from Scripture. Apollinarius argued from Scripture. Nestorius argued from Scripture. 

The politics -- indeed the violence -- that forged what we now believe as Christians is depressing. I think I had some sense of holy men gathering to discern what God wanted the church to affirm. Not so. In fact, the winners were more often the least holy and the most politically crafty. It reminds me of something Victor Frankl said about the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The more virtuous you were, the less likely you were to survive. "The best of us did not return." [1]

The century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ. I have always felt like the final conclusion made perfect sense -- one person, two natures, fully God, fully human. Yet the players in this debate seem far from holy intellectuals. They seem more like the Gangs of New York.

2. Jenkins reviews the lead up. 

The earliest centuries saw options -- arguing from the books we now call the New Testament, no less -- that were early considered wrong. These were not evil people with twisted mustaches. They were the losers, and history is told by the winners. Again, by faith, we believe that God picked the winners whether they were good people or not.

Some early losers:

• The Ebionites -- Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah but not that he was divine. It is debated whether they represent a form of Jewish Christianity going back to the earliest church.
• Adoptionists -- This one lasted a while. They believed that Jesus became the Son of God at some point (for example, at his baptism). Mark does not give any explicit teaching on Jesus before his baptism.
• Perhaps Matthew and Luke could be used to argue that he was Son of God through the virgin birth, but they say nothing explicit about what he might have been before that. Some early Christians might not have believed in Jesus' pre-existence.
• Some Gnostics had a form of adoptionism. Cerinthus (time of John) thought Jesus was possessed by a divine force at his baptism.
• Paul of Samosata (bishop of Antioch in the 260s) believed the human Jesus was born of Mary and then that the Logos descended on him at his baptism.
• Some might have believed Jesus became Son of God at his resurrection.
• By contrast, Docetists (around at the time of 1 John) believed that Jesus only seemed to be human.
• Sabellius (around 220) believed that God was only one person who kept changing hats. The Father became Jesus became the Spirit. One person.

3. Then we have the 300s. Constantine makes Christianity legal, which means the door is now open for Christians to develop power and use it to stomp on others. I will say, reading this book has made me much more open to those who think Constantine inadvertantly opened the door to the wholesale corruption of Christianity. We seem to do better when people -- by which I mean non-Christians -- are trying to kill us.

Some losers:

• Arius -- "There was a point when the Son did not exist." Arius believed Jesus was pre-existent and that he was like God. It's hard for us to fathom how popular this version of faith was in the 300s -- more popular than the orthodox. And Arius may very well have been more godly than Athanasius. Christianity among the Germanic tribes in the 400s was more Arian than orthodox.
• Apollinarius -- To be frank, most popular Christians today might just as well be Apollinarians or Eutychians. They more or less saw Jesus as having one nature -- a divine one. Apollinarius thought Jesus had a human body and divine soul. Eutychus thought that Jesus' humanity was like a drop in the ocean compared to his divinity.
• If the Council of Ephesus in 449 had stood (the Robber Council), we would all believe that Jesus did not have a human nature -- or at least not enough of one to count.

4. In 380, the emperor Theodosius II picks a winner for Christianity in the Empire. He picks Nicene Christianity. Thus, we are all Nicenes.

The two centers of the conflict for the next 70 years or so are Antioch and Alexandria. Antioch is always defending the humanity of Jesus. Alexandria is always pushing a single nature that is divine. Antioch is the place of biblical scholarship. Alexandria is the place with a history of Platonism.

Alexandria seems to wield the power of sabotage and the power of the mob. Frankly, I kept thinking of MAGA Christians as I read about them. 

Constantinople had become the center of Roman power, so it was a key power with regard to its bishop. These bishops often were chosen from Antioch. Then Alexandria would use its power to trash them. Most of the time, they did this by finding something about the Antiochenes or patriarch of Constantinople that they could call heretical and stir up a mob over. Again, MAGA Christians.

Meanwhile, Rome was trying to consolidate its power but was really like an old man whose hearing aid isn't working. They don't speak Greek so they don't really know entirely what's going on. They're invited to the council but can't really hear very well.

All sorts of forgeries are being created in this era. And of course, on a popular level, people believe whatever they want to believe, which is what their tribe believes.

"People knew the slogans, but did they really understand them? Actually an excellent case can be made that such distinctions were beyond the reach not just of ordinary believers but of many church leaders" (62).

"Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father or of like being, homoousios or homoisousios? Was he from two natures or in two?" (63).

5. Nestorius was another target of the Alexandrians. It's not at all clear that he was the heretic he is made out to be.

Christians "did not fully understand the theology they believed" (67). But they knew the groups they were against. "Once something was an ism," it was a target. Once a stereotype was established, it could be used to destroy someone. All you had to do is attach the label to them.

Sound familiar? This is quintissential MAGA Christianity. "Socialist" "Leftist liberal" "woke." No need to have any.thought whatsoever. Once the label is attached, they're toast.

"Whatever he actually preached, Nestorius became the central figure of Nestorianism" (67). "Theological debate became a game of guilt by association."

"Understanding a war of isms helps us trace the course of theological development thorugh these centuries... In each case, advocates were reacting as much to the stereotype of the enemy movement prevailing at the time rather than to any rational analysis of its teachings" (67-68).

[1] Man's Search for Meaning.

Ehrman Chapter 9: The Council on the Trinity

Only the Epilog after this post, on chapter 9 of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God.

So far:
Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies
8. After the New Testament (2nd and 3rd centuries)

And now chapter 9, "Paradoxes on the Road to Nicaea"...

Like the last chapter, I did not find a great deal in this chapter to disagree with. The bottom line, as it has been all along, is whether you believe God was leading the Church to Nicaea or whether you see the process as nothing more than the power plays and coincidences of history. It is of course possible that Ehrman is off on some details, but if so I am not expert enough to see it.

1. So it seems accurate to say that, with each decision Christians made to accept one alternative and reject another, they were on a path toward Nicaea. I have heard it said that Nicaea was the inevitable outcome if the church was to affirm everything it needed to affirm while denying everything it needed to deny.

This statement, it seems to me, is something similar to what Ehrman is saying when Trinity is a collection of "ortho-paradoxes." He grounds the Trinitarian paradoxes in two things.

First, there are the paradoxes of Scripture. The Gospel of John says that Jesus is God. But it also says that Jesus is human. Isaiah 45:21 says there is only one God. But Psalm 45:6 speaks to another God.

Second, Christians were navigating between extremes on both sides of issues. "But both of two opposing views cannot be completely wrong, or nothing is right, and so the orthodox--in attacking opposing views--had to affirm part of each view as being right and the rest as being wrong. the result was a paradox that each of the opposing sides was wrong in what it denied but right in what it affirmed" (327).

Here's another way of putting it: "If you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two" (328). "As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical."

I can't think of anything really to disagree with here.

2. In the lead up to Nicaea, Ehrman treats several individuals along the way who reflect the fluidity of faith in the centuries leading up to the great Council of Nicaea in AD325.

Justin Martyr
Justin lived in the mid-100s. Ehrman means to show that while Justin is movement toward orthodoxy, he is not there yet. I am not an expert on Justin, but it would certainly make sense if this were true.

I did wonder whether he had Justin quite right on Jesus being the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament. Given what Ehrman has said about Paul's Christology earlier in the book, it would be easy to read this section to say that Justin had the same view.

However, I have more thought that Justin saw the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament as a Christophany. A Christophany is when Jesus appears in the Old Testament in some form, such as in the form of the Angel of the Lord. This would be something quite different from Jesus being an angel who appeared. It would be Jesus appearing as an angel.

I have read a little of David Runia on the impact of Logos thinking on early Christianity. Runia does suggest that the Logos Christology we find in these early centuries (e.g., in Origin) would eventually prove inadequate in the light of full Trinitarian belief. The Logos emerges from God in relation to the creation, and this doesn't neatly fit "eternally begotten." So Runia argues, if I remember correctly, that the later church stopped using this imagery that had been used earlier, as the orthodox view became the norm.

Novatian
Novatian was a problem in the church because of the schism he led in the 200s after the persecution of Decius in 250. I believe it was he who inspired Cyprian to say that long since famous quote, "There is no salvation outside the church."

Ehrman says that "his theology, however, was completely orthodox in its day" (335). Again, while not being an expert, I suspect Ehrman is correct (although remember the distinction I made in my last post between not violating an orthodoxy and it not yet being appropriate to speak of an orthodox position yet on a particular topic). Novatian disagreed with the modalists, on the one hand, and the adoptionists on the other. For him, Christ was divine but he was distinct from God the Father.

Where Ehrman argues the later church would consider him heretical is in the fact that he saw Christ as subordinate to God. Christ is Lord and God of everything except for God the Father, to whom he is subject. I believe Ehrman rightly sees this subordinationist understanding of Christ as a view that would later be deemed incorrect.

Dionysius of Rome
As Ehrman presents the situation, one Dionysius in Rome wrote to one Dionysius in Alexandria, to steer him toward unity in his conception of the Trinity. Dionysius of Alexandria, in combating modalism was coming to close to tri-theism, in D of R's view. In D of R's view, D of A is too close to affirming three Gods to combat those who see the three persons as three faces of the same God.

Dionysius of Rome insisted that the unity within threeness had to be maintained.

3. We thus arrive at the trigger for the Council of Nicaea. The emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD313. Ehrman spends a little time discussing Constantine in this chapter. He takes the position that Constantine saw Christianity as a potential way of unifying the empire. Ehrman is also sympathetic to the view that Constantine truly believed it and thus that it would have been important for him to get the worship of Christ correct within his kingdom.

So Constantine writes the priests of Alexandria about their understanding of an Old Testament passage. Ehrman wonders if the passage was Proverbs 8, which is about wisdom as God's master craftsman in creation.

As an aside, I might say that this is a heavy role that theologians and scholars often play within a group. I sometimes get asked about various issues (I received a question via Facebook messaging just last night on the various Greek words for worship in the NT). Orthodoxy is stable. It isn't so hard to answer a question like, "What does orthodoxy teach about x," because there often are right and wrong answers. It is often possible to say, "The consensus of Christian history is this."

A question like, "What does the Bible teach," on the other hand, seems tougher to me, because the Bible is a flow of voices addressing a flow of situations. In my world, most of us who count as scholars are really scholars who try to connect specific theological traditions with other domains of scholarship. The more idiosyncratic the tradition, the more unstable the connection between scholars of that tradition and broader scholarship. As a Wesleyan, there are specific concerns that have to be kept in mind when answering a question, and from the vantage point of an outsider, these might appear to skew the answers. The same applies to other traditions.

All that is to say that I prefer to give options as answers, based on particular points of view, rather than to pretend to have the answers. I at least agree with Ehrman on this point. History is a science that arrives at greater and lesser probabilities given the evidence as we have it. The negotiation of history in relation to theology, on the other hand, is a much less straightforward dialog that has everything to do with what assumptions you start with. And that is why there are thousands upon thousands of divergent Christian opinions on things.

4. The answer to Constantine from one of the priests in Egypt, Arius, brought him into major conflict with his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Arius suggested that Jesus was indeed the "firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). He was divine. He was Lord over all creation. We must worship him.

BUT, Arius taught that only God the Father was without beginning. There was a point when the Son did not exist. For Arius, it was before time, before creation, for Christ was God's agent in creation. So, like Origen before him, Arius saw Christ as superior to all of creation, just not as "of one substance" as the Father. For Arius, like others before him, Christ was only subordinate to God the Father. He was supreme over everything else that exists.

I would agree with Ehrman that Arius' position was not yet heretical at this time. The paint is not wet. I personally don't think we can speak of orthodoxy on this subject until the consensus was firm in the 400s. To me, orthodoxy is not as simple as a vote taken by some group of men at a council. That is because, to me, orthodoxy is a matter of Spirit consensus.

Arius would lose this vote. It would take decades for what would become orthodoxy to become what I am calling a consensus. But the current position of Christendom won the day in 325. Christ is "of one being" with the Father. He is "begotten, not made." Indeed, he is "eternally begotten."

So the Spirit consensus was beginning to congeal. Christ is not a distinct being from God the Father. He is not even "similar" in being to God the Father--the compromise position suggested by Eusebius. He was "of the same substance" and co-eternal, along with the Holy Spirit.

Turkey Day 9: Istanbul was Constantinople...

Turkey in 10 Days
1. General Remarks
2. What to Bring
3. Day 1: Traveling There
4. Day 2: Troy
5. Day 3: Pergamum, Thyatira, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna 
6. Day 4: Ephesus and Laodicea
7. Day 5: Colossae and Perga
8. Day 6: Galatia: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra
9. Day 7: Derbe and Tarsus
10. Day 8: Cappadocia and Nicaea

11. Day 9: Chalcedon and Constantinople (Istanbul)
When I told my daughter and step-daughter that I was flying into Istanbul, they independently started singing, "Istanbul was Constantinople, Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople."  I had no idea what they were singing.  I guess it's a 1953 song that was in Mona Lisa Smile.  I'm still dumbfounded that a couple lines from a ditty could generate so much enthusiasm while "The Hittites ruled this whole region for over a 1000 years gets nothing." :-)

I was tasked to find something to bring home that said, "Istanbul, Constantinople" on it.  The shop keeper looked at me with a puzzled look.  "Istanbul is Constantinople."

"But do you have something that says both Istanbul and Constantinople on it."

"No, Constantinople is no longer.  It is only Istanbul.  Here is Constantinople."

"Thank you.  Never mind."

Chalcedon
Is Jesus half human?  Was he so divine that his humanity doesn't matter?  Does he have a split personality--divine on weekends but human during the week?  The Council of Chalcedon settled that debate in AD451. Just across the Bosphorus from Istanbul is Kadiköy (40-59-27.36N, 29-01-01.50E), where the council took place.

Looking toward Chalcedon from Istanbul

Constantinople
Of course it's not Constantinople any more.  "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam."  And it was Byzantium in between.  Constantine actually shifted the HQ of Rome here in the 300s and "Rome" lingered here long after Italy itself was no longer under Roman control.

With a visit to Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia; 41-00-30.10N, 28-58-48.39), we finished our tour of the seven ecumenical councils, the first four of which made the full transition from the New Testament church to Christianity as we now know it.

Aya Sofya

Here's the list:
1. Council of Nicaea (325) - decided on the Trinity
2. Council of Constantinople (381) - finalized details in the Nicene Creed
3. Council of Ephesus (431) - did Jesus have a split personality
4. Council of Chalcedon (451) - Jesus was one person with two natures

5. Council of Constantinople (553) - condemned certain authors
6. Council of Constantinople (680) - condemned the idea that Jesus only had one will
7. Council of Nicaea (787) - It's okay to have pictures of Jesus and others.

We left Iznik (Nicaea) after breakfast and drove 150 around the north side of the lake until we hit 575 going north through Orhangazi.  You can take this road all the way around the bay to save money on a ferry, but you'll add an hour or more to your time.  The traffic on 0-4 coming into Istanbul can be horrific.

We had two ferry options and took the second.  It was something like 50 lira.  In retrospect, since the traffic was so bad, we probably would have taken the first ferry option as 575 turned east coming north.  It would have been a longer ferry, but we would have cut off more travel on the north side.

You can't miss Istanbul, and the signs for Aya Sofya should be clear.  We passed a water cannon tank at a stadium on our way to Sofya.  We didn't know it at the time, but they were gearing up for one of the early riots over the park the conservative government wants to turn into a mall.  The riots have only increased since we left.

Istanbul
Aya Sofya is now a museum, and while it is full of Muslim art...

Aya Sofya Islamic caligraphy

Aya Sofya caligraphic chandelier

... they are also now restoring some of the underlying Christian mosaics.

Aya Sofya - Jesus, Mary, John

Directly across from Aya Sofya is the exquisite Blue Mosque:

Blue Mosque

It's insides are also exquisite:

Inside Dome of Blue Mosque

Next to the Blue Mosque are some plunderings of other ancient sites:

Serpent column celebrating the Greeks' victory over the Persians in 479BC

Obelisk of Thutmose III (1500s BC) brought here in AD390

Ross also went into the Grand Palace.  We missed the Grand Bazaar where the latest James Bond was partially filmed.

Finding parking and a hotel were first on the agenda once we got close to Aya Sofya. Ross found us a very nice one.

Istanbul Hotel Bali

It had exquisite views from the top, where breakfast was served the next morning.  It was a little more expensive than our usual fare, and there are no doubt much less expensive hotels down the hill behind Aya Sofya.  But you couldn't have beat the view.

We ended the night with our first and last Turkish pizza at this exquisite place, tucked in an alley off the  main road running up and down by the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya.

exquisite Turkish Pizza

Turkey Day 8: Cappadocia and Nicaea

Turkey in 10 Days
1. General Remarks
2. What to Bring
3. Day 1: Traveling There
4. Day 2: Troy
5. Day 3: Pergamum, Thyatira, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna 
6. Day 4: Ephesus and Laodicea
7. Day 5: Colossae and Perga
8. Day 6: Galatia: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra
9. Day 7: Derbe and Tarsus

10. Day 8: Cappadocia and Nicaea
Thursday was mostly a travel day.  Having gone as far east in Turkey as we would go, we would spend most of Thursday on a bee-line toward Istanbul that went straight through the capital of Ankara.  It was also the closest we would come to ground zero of ancient Hittite country (Hattusa, now Boğazkale).  The Hittites were at their peak around the time of Abraham (see Genesis 23).

Cappadocia
Cappadocia is mentioned in 1 Peter 1:1 as one of its destinations, including several other places we had already visited (Asia, Galatia).  But for Christians, probably the most significant aspect of the region is the fact that the Cappadocian fathers were centered here: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus.

Cappadocian cave houses

Everyone assumes that we get the Trinity from the Bible, but I don't think Christians realize how much of what we believe about Jesus was a matter of serious debate in the 300s.  Both sides claimed to have Scripture on their side and there were a number of decades where the Trinity as we know it wasn't winning.

The Cappadocians went philosophical because biblical debates had reached a stalemate. The Cappadocians were the ones that worked out the "one substance, three persons" that would become part of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381. (By engaging philosophy and the Greek liberal arts, they also helped Christianity become a premier religion :-)

After breakfast on Thursday, we made our way to Göreme, which is super-easy to find from Nevshehir.  Just east of town is where Christians carved monasteries and churches out of the relatively soft rock that once upon a time had been formed by lava.  Earlier volcano activity had left "fairy chimneys" all over the place.  This is the general area where Star Wars filmed Tatooine.

Cappadocia

Here, not only in times of persecution but for centuries, Christians had monasteries and churches inside the fairy chimneys.  It's 15 lira to get into the "open air museum."

Cappadocian monastery

The 11th century art in the churches in these "chimneys" was exquisite, especially in the "Dark Church."    This cave church is an extra 8 lira but definitely worth it--the best part of the entire site for me.  For the record, I didn't take this photo:

Dark Church at Cappadocia

We had pretty much finished walking around the main site before the bulk of the tour buses arrived. We didn't go to  the "Buckle Church," about 50 meters down the hill (the ticket to the open air museum gets you in there also).  We heard it was fabulous.

Travel
To get back toward Istanbul, we decided first to take 300 west to Aksaray (about 70 kilometers) in order to get on the larger highway 750.  If you've paid attention to the road numbers, both of these are familiar.  300 goes all the way to Izmir near Ephesus.  750 goes south down to Tarsus.

But our goal was to take 750 north through Ankara, which soon joins up with the superhighway 0-4.  0-4 goes all the way to Istanbul, but our sights were set on Nicaea.  It's about 540 kilometers from Aksaray to the environs of a town called Sakarya.  It's near this city, only about 150 kilometers shy of Istanbul itself, that you finally turn south on 650.  Take that about 50 kilometers until you can turn west onto 150 around Mekece.  That will take you to Iznik, which is modern day Nicaea.

Nicaea
After that much travel, it's nice to settle into a hotel.  There is a string of hotels along Lake Iznik.  You can get to the lake easily simply by following the ruins of the medieval city wall, which you will hit eventually if you just keep driving through town from any direction.  650 itself actually goes straight to the lake.

Lake Iznik at Nicaea

Ross was now an expert at negotiating hotel rates, and we could have had our pick of a half dozen.  He got one of the best down to 120 lira a room.  Its proprietor was also a pro--a worthy adversary.

A central road led from the lake to the main road through Iznik, a road that runs roughly parallel to the lake shore.  We decided to walk there for a change.  We found the mosque created out of the church that housed the seventh ecumenical council of 787, where Christians decided it was okay to use icons, images and art of saints.

Nicaean church now mosque

It doesn't seem like we know exactly where the Council of Nicaea was originally held, where the Trinity was first decided (325).  But I wouldn't be surprised if a later church was built on a significant earlier site.

Some more lovely baklava and we walked back to our hotel. In the morning we would return to Istanbul.

Jesus' Balance of Power

This is from the last chapter of my second Jesus book:
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The Nicene Creed, said in many churches today, was a perfected version of what the Council of Nicaea decided in 325, but it didn’t reach something like its current form until the next council at the city of Constantinople in AD381. That creed says that, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

It was now agreed that Jesus was divine in the same way that God the Father was divine. And of course it was agreed that he was human too. A Christian leader in the 300s named Gregory of Nazianzus famously argued that “what has not been assumed cannot be healed.” What he meant is that if Jesus did not really take on humanity, he can’t heal us.

So after working out the basics of the Trinity, Christians for the next hundred plus years would debate how Jesus’ humanity and divinity fit together. Now that Christianity was legal, they didn’t have to spend as much time worrying about persecution. In fact, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the only legal religion in 380. The contents of the Bible were also coming together.  By the year 400, Christians pretty much agreed on which books belonged in the New Testament. This “peace and quiet” created a space for them to iron out some of these issues.

The end result was the common Christian belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine in such a way as that both were real features of who he was. The church steered a path between a number of competing ideas. For example, a bishop named Apollinarius offered the possibility that Jesus had a human body but a divine mind, as if the divine Logos had taken over a body. The result basically would suggest that Jesus didn’t have any human element in his thinking.

Still later, an archbishop named Nestorius suggested that Jesus’ almost had a split personality—a human one and a divine one. In response, a man named Eutyches argued Jesus only had one nature that was a mixture of human and divine. No doubt these were all well-intentioned attempts to figure things out, even though the politics of it all often got ugly.

The final decision, like the one about the Trinity, was very balanced. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He was only one person (against Nestorius) but he had two natures (against Apollinarius and Eutyches). He was really tempted and experienced genuine humanity in its fullness. But he was also truly God walking on the earth.

Obviously by 451 Christians had come a long way from simple biblical statements like 2 Corinthians 13:14: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The Corinthians may have had a very simple sense of such a verse. Here are three different persons: One God, one Lord, one Spirit.

When we read it today, we believe all three are mysteriously the same, one God. So Jesus the Lord is both the fully human Jesus who walked the earth and the fully divine Jesus who came from heaven. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.