Sunday, October 10, 2010

WHICH CHRIST DO YOU BELIEVE IN?

WHICH CHRIST DO YOU BELIEVE IN?

Or in proper English, “IN WHICH CHRIST DO YOU BELIEVE? 

Is there more than one Christ?  Is there more than one God?  Is there more than one Church?  Is there more than one Christian Faith?  Is there more than one Baptism?

The Scriptures tell us that there will be false teachings and false Christs.  Jesus said that many would come “in My Name” saying “here is Christ and there is Christ” and then He told us “go ye not out to meet them”.   The Saviour said there would be a great falling away from truth as people turn to what pleases their ears, so much so that He raised the question, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on the Earth?”  All the teachings from Scripture that warn us about false Christs and false Faiths suggest that the false will appear so right and be so close to the true that it will be difficult to distinguish it and many will be deceived.  In fact, it will be so deceptive that the true believers will scarcely be saved.  That which is false rarely comes at us with blatant denial but with subtle deceptions.

Last week when I was working my second job at the library, I got into a conversation with an elderly gentleman who was visiting here from India.  I asked him about life in India and religion in particular.  He was enthusiastic about the democracy of India and the spread of many religions.  He, himself, was Hindu, he said, but he believes in Christ, too. 

I remember talking with the Hara Krishna’s on the street in downtown Detroit when I lived there in the 70’s.  They enthusiastically told me of their belief in Christ as Saviour.   They, of course, and the man from India, do not believe in  Christ of the Bible and the Church.  They have a very different understanding of Christ from that which the Church has held from the beginning.

From this we can see that it is not enough for someone to simply say, “I believe in Christ”.  It is important to know what you believe about Christ – who He is and what He has done to save you.   We must believe in the one true Christ and not in one made up in someone’s mind or imagination. 

In the world of modern day Christianity there is a common understanding that if a person says they believe in Christ as their Lord and Saviour they are considered to be Christians.  Thus, we have many “Christian” preachers, books, radio stations, authors, movies and music (Rap, even!) that are all considered Christian because they use the name of Christ and other Christian terminology.  But Christian terminology means different things to different people.  The same Christian terminology means one thing to a Mormon and another to a Jehovah’s Witness.  It means one thing to a Scientologist and another thing to an Evangelical.  So just because someone uses Christian terms or even confesses faith in Christ does not mean they believe in the one true Christ and one true Faith.  It doesn’t even necessarily mean they are Christians. 

St. Paul warned about those who preach “another gospel”.  They were using the same terminology but attaching different meanings to the words.  St. Paul considered another gospel so serious and wrong that he anathematized those who preach another gospel than that which was preached by the apostles.  Today, the word gospel has come to mean just the basic kernel of good news concerning Christ’s death and resurrection.  But in the Scriptures and throughout the history of the Church the Gospel of Christ embraces all that He is, all that He did and all that He taught for our salvation, not just one or two things.  Without this content, you can easily end up with a false Christ.

So, which Christ do you believe in?  Do you even know?  Have you even thought about it?  Many have not.  They just believe in a Christ who died for their sins.  But so does the Mormon, and Scientologist, and Jehovah’s Witness, and Roman Catholic, and Hindu, and Seventh Day Adventist, and D.J Jakes, and The World Wide Church of God (founded by Garner Ted Armstrong), and Prophetess’ Bynum and White, and Kenneth Copeland and the “name it and claim it” movement, and the “holy laughter” movement, and Mike Murdoch, and Joel Osteen, and scores of other movements, denominations, mega churches and religious gurus. 

I recently had a conversation with a good friend who attends a large Evangelical church.  I was talking about how important it is that we believe in the true Christ.  It didn’t take long for my friend to admit he had never thought about these issues and his pastor never preaches or teaches about them.  The central thrust of his church is on life lessons – how to be a leader, how to succeed in life, how to have joy and contentment and how to live a good moral life.  To be sure, faith in Christ is understood to be the motivation and reason for all of this but there is little emphasis on the content of the Christian Faith since the goal is to embrace as many people as possible.   Emphasis on doctrine has a way of turning people off or offending them.

Thus, many of the mega churches avoid doctrine beyond a few basic and general themes.    The content of the Christian Faith beyond these themes is considered unimportant.  Thus, their music doesn’t teach the content of the faith but focuses on feelings, emotions, experiences, joys, sorrows, victories and feel-goodisms.  The sermons are mostly motivational lectures on how to live a good and happy life. They celebrate the Fourth of July, Veteran’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but they don’t celebrate the feast days of Pentecost, the Ascension, the Baptism of Christ, the Transfiguration or any of the other great feasts of the Christian Faith that are essential for understanding who Christ is and how He saves us.  My friend didn’t even know what the Transfiguration was or meant and didn’t see how it related to our view of Christ or our understanding of salvation.  However, Mother’s Day and the Fourth of July are very important celebrations at his church.  This should lead us to ask, “What then, is the content of my Christian Faith?” 
More probing with my Evangelical friend revealed beliefs that the Church condemned long ago as heretical and outside of the Christian Faith.  He thought Joseph was really somehow the father of Jesus.  He didn’t believe that Jesus took His flesh from the Virgin Mary but that it was somehow miraculously given by God.  He didn’t believe that the baby born of the Virgin Mary was God but thought the baby was just Jesus or Christ who received the Holy Spirit at His Baptism.

 If we believe in Christ without content and many of the details really don’t matter, then it is possible that such a Christ could just be an emotional feeling or a psychological crutch.   Christ, in this context, could be very much like the higher being that is espoused in the twelve-step program of AA.  It doesn’t matter whom you believe in or what the content of that belief is so long as you believe in something or someone.  You draw your strength and hope and help from this psychological crutch.  Whether the something or someone you believe in is truth or a figment of your imagination doesn’t matter.   All that matters is that you believe in someone or something greater than or outside of yourself.

A Mormon who truly believes the Mormon doctrine of Christ does not believe in the Christ of the true Christian Faith.  But he/she may tell you that the Christ they believe in has changed their lives and saved them from a life of sin and failure.   This Christ gives them hope and comfort and assures them of heaven just like your Christ.  And the way they know it is true is from a “burning in the bosom” – an emotional feeling they got when they embraced the Mormon faith.  The same, or something similar, may be said by someone who has been saved from being an alcoholic through AA simply by focusing their faith on someone or something in their imagination.   

The point is, there is a big difference between faith in an emotional crutch of someone’s imagination and faith in the true Christ of the historic Christian Faith; the difference resides in the content of Christ and that faith.   A person may find an emotional experience of salvation in anyone or anything but it is not necessarily the salvation of the Christian Faith.

The faith that does not give due attention to the content of Christ or the Christian Faith beyond a few basic terms will not have the same understanding of salvation as held by the Orthodox Christian Church.  Speaking in general terms, my Evangelical friend perceives salvation primarily as a spiritual salvation of the soul that centers in the private experience of the individual.  Thus, content beyond “Christ died for our sins” is not that important.  The soul is saved from its sins by believing in Christ who died for our sins.   What was necessary for Christ to do that, in terms of the meaning of the fall of Adam, and how Christ accomplished our salvation (beyond just dying for our sins) are not very important.  Thus, the content of Christ’s birth and life and the salvation provided in all that He did and taught are not so important.  For my friend, the essential importance is to feel that one’s sins are forgiven by trusting in Christ and with that comes the hope of heaven.  

The Orthodox Faith, on the other hand perceives salvation, not just as forgiveness of sins and not just as a private experience, but as the redemption and restoration of body and soul as one, in the context of the life of the Church, the Body of Christ.  In Adam, creation became subject to sin, corruption and death.  Christ had to be a true second Adam, a true man, who took human nature from a human being.  A divinely created human nature would not be a true man but a superman who could not stand in man’s place to restore our nature.   As true man, Christ became one of us and partook of our nature.  Does that mean he partook of our sin since human nature is sinful?  No.  Human nature is not sinful in and of itself.  Sin has attached itself to human nature as a foreign element but human nature was created good by God.  Christ took on human nature (and this is why the Incarnation is so central in Orthodoxy) in order to redeem human nature from the curse of the fall.  He was tempted as was Adam but Christ overcame that temptation and became the perfect man.   In and through His saving deeds all of fallen creation is redeemed – restored and made holy.  It is essential that we be united to this Saviour.  This Christ alone is the path back to God.  He alone is the Door and the Way because He alone, as true man, is flesh of our flesh, and as true God, is very God of very God.  This is why the Scriptures tell us that there is no salvation in any other Name under heaven, than the Name of Christ.   But simply to use His Name with any and all understandings of that Name does not join us to the one true Christ.

Thus, Christ redeemed creation and man as both body and soul.  The body must be redeemed and saved along with our soul for what one does affects the other.  Salvation then, is perceived not just as an emotional feeling in the heart and not just as the forgiveness of sins but as a restoration of body and soul to God’s intended purpose and design.  By being united to Christ, we are made partakers of His perfect nature (the second Adam) and thus set on the path to the salvation of body and soul.   Forgiveness of sins is only the beginning.   In that forgiveness both body and soul must, through union with Christ, return to God as a holy and acceptable sacrifice.  Salvation is a return of our fallen nature to God, a journey of sanctification and deification; a journey of throwing off sin and corruption and a putting on or partaking of the divine nature of Christ.  From this view of salvation we can begin to see why the Orthodox Faith emphasizes prayer, fasting, asceticism, self-denial and the acquiring of virtues.  All of this is necessary for our separation from the sin that has attached itself to our bodies and souls.  All of this is necessary to unite ourselves, body and soul, with the perfect nature of Christ.   Thus, there is a strong emphasis on the restoration of both body and soul and not merely on forgiveness of sins and hope of heaven.

Now we can begin to see the importance of the proper understanding of the birth of Christ.  He had to take his human nature from the Virgin Mary in order to be truly man to reverse the curse of Adam.  Yet, at the same time, he had to be God or else he could not overcome sin and death, thus he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and not by Joseph.   The hymns and prayers in every Orthodox service emphasize these truths as crucial to our salvation.  In the Church we call Mary the Theotokos which is Greek for “God-bearer”.  In this way we preserve the truth that the baby born of the Virgin Mary was and is God - Immanuel.   We constantly confess this in the Creed, that Christ is begotten, not made,… true God of true God. of one essence with the Father. We confess Christ with two natures in one Person, unconfused and undivided.

Along with all of this, in Orthodoxy, salvation is perceived more as a corporate experience than as a private experience. Salvation is not left up to each individual to decide how or what it is.  Nor is it left depending on some spiritual or emotional experience.  These things have their place but they cannot be separated from the corporate experience and life of the Church or set up over and above it.  Our salvation is not derived from our private spiritual and emotional experiences but from the Life of the God-man in the Church.  Private experiences may lead us to Christ, but they, of themselves are not the new birth.  Besides, we can easily be deluded and deceived by private experiences that grow out of the sin and death that has attached itself to our nature.   This is why all spirituality and experience must be subjected to the judgment of the Church.  Without this you have….well, you have the proliferation of  Faiths, and Christs and churches that is Protestant/Evangelicalism.  

The Orthodox Christian Faith teaches that Christ established His Church as the means of our salvation. (Incidentally, the Church makes no distinction between the Orthodox Christian faith and the Christian faith, believing they are one and the same.  Why would anyone hold to a faith that they do not consider to be identical to the Christian faith?) Christ said, “I will build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”.  The only Christianity described in the New Testament is described in terms of the Church.  This salvation was preached by the Church and accomplished in communion with the Church.  The Church is the Body of Christ, of which He is the Head.  In the New Testament there is no mention of Christianity, only the Church that is composed of each visible community in communion with the apostles’ doctrine and life.   

In the Church our salvation is personal (personal faith is essential) but it is not privatized.  We are saved by uniting our faith to the Faith of the Church, which is the Body of Christ. Salvation flows from Christ the Head to all members of that Body.   The Faith of the Church was established once and for all by Christ through His apostles. When we unite ourselves to this Body we don’t have to figure out what is or isn’t true or how we should understand this or that.  All of this has been settled.  Christ told the apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them into all truth.  Thus, it is essential to be united to that one Faith and one Body that has an unbroken continuity with the apostolic Faith.     Only in this Body can we be certain that we possess the fullness of the Gospel of Christ and not something different.

We enter the Church through Holy Baptism.  Water, along with all of creation, has been redeemed by the God-man and thus is used to affect our communion with God.  God has chosen to unite us to Christ through Holy Baptism in the Church.  Space does not permit citing all the New Testament passages that teach this but a search of the verses under “baptism” in a good concordance will show this to be true.   In the New Testament there is no private salvation.  Everyone who believes is born again and united to Christ in the Church through Holy Baptism.  Baptism is the new birth, as Christ told Nicodemus.  There is no mention of the new birth in the New Testament apart from its association with baptism.  It should also be noted that Holy Baptism, as well as all the sacraments, cannot be given outside of the Church.  How could Holy Baptism, which unites us to Christ and His Body, be given by someone or something other than the Church?  The Church is the Ark of Salvation and no other organization or person, however good and sincere, can be that Ark.  Protestant/Evangelicals believe this also.  The difference is in whether there is one Church or many Churches.

The life given in Holy Baptism is then sealed with the Baptism of the Holy Spirit in the Church.  Once again, redeemed matter, Holy Oil, derived from the Bishop, the successor to the apostles, becomes the visible means and channel that God uses to seal the gift of the Holy Spirit to those who are born again in Holy Baptism. 

This new life is then nourished and nurtured through various other means given in the Church.   Life in the Holy Spirit must be guarded, weeded, protected and fed.  The means God has given include prayer, fasting, struggle against sin and the struggle to be like Christ.  When we sin and soil our robe of baptism, we receive restoration through Confession and Absolution.  Once again, God uses redeemed matter, the person of a priest, to convey or channel this grace to us just as He did throughout the Old Testament and in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament.  Then, as the life given to any child in natural birth must be nourished with food, so the Life of Christ in us is nourished and fed by the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion.   Here again, redeemed matter, the bread and wine, are used as the means of uniting our nature to the nature of Christ.  Both body and soul are united to Christ by partaking of the Body and Blood of the Saviour.

Holy Communion is the central focus of the Divine Liturgy of the Church.  Here the redeemed matter of icons, candles and incense are used to bring us into communion with God.  Here our bodies, along with the soul, are being redeemed, not only by Holy Communion, but by signing our bodies with the Cross of Christ, offering our prayers up to God with the incense that we breath, venerating the icons (the communion of the saints), bowing, and other physical activity.  We see, and touch, and hear and taste our salvation through a redeemed Creation in Christ the Redeemer. The hymns and prayers, written by holy men of God in communion with the apostolic Faith, also convey the grace of God in that they all teach and expound the content of the Orthodox Faith and mystically unite us to that Faith. 

 In contrast to this is the Protestant/Evangelical service where the focus is on the song leader, the singers, the music and the preacher. The content of the services focus, not so much on the saving doctrines of Christ as much as on the people leading the services and the feelings and emotions of the worshipers.  These services put man, his words and his actions, at the center and promote a privatized and emotional view of salvation of the soul.

What we can gather from all of this is that the view we have of Christ is reflected in the way we worship.  You really can tell pretty much what people believe by the way they worship.  Worship tends to be either worldly and man-centered or other-worldly and God centered, depending on the basic core of beliefs of the worshipers.  One emphasizes the feelings and emotions of the worshipers with an entertainment format, while the other emphasizes the content of the Christian Faith and other-worldly format.  One is directed more at salvation in the heart, while the other seeks to unite us to the Faith of the Church.

 The conclusion of the whole matter is this.  Our view and understanding of Christ determines our view and understanding of salvation.  The path of salvation we take and the forms of worship we use do not simply reflect different tastes for different people.  They reflect different understandings of Christ, the Church and salvation.  We may use the same terms but we also may attach different understandings to those terms.  That is why we should unite ourselves to the Church that preserves the apostolic content and meanings with faithfulness and fullness.  

Which Christ do you believe in? 

       Joseph Bragg  10/10/10