Ancient Anglican

Church is Mother. In the Church we are conceived and given spiritual birth. She nurses us in our infancy, brings us up as children, and guides us into mature perfection. She is there to pick us up when we fall and to encourage us when we lag.  – John Calvin

The Spirit is the very present and active power of God that transforms a believer into something new. 

The dispute over the filioque challenges us to think more deeply about the very nature of the Trinity. 

So what does that return look like? A return to the beatific plumb line is not a matter of your own effort to just be better tomorrow. Rather it is a true return to God Himself. If your heart is out of plumb seek him out. Be in constant prayer with God.  Words are unnecessary. Go wherever you feel his presence and simply be.

  Every week, the Creed requires that we affirm this humiliation and exaltation of Christ through which our salvation is worked.  It also provides us with the shape of our own salvation.

The paradigm that this portion of the Creed adopts is that of Jesus as a victorious conquering King. In the Resurrection he defeats death, and in the Ascension he is elevated to his position of kingly power and authority.

When the Creed speaks of the Incarnation it uses the mythic language of a descending/ascending deity.  Think through why the Creed retains this (pagan?) mythic language to describe the Incarnation. 

The promise is that we, in our very being, will be changed, for it is the kingdom of God itself that comes upon us. Matt. 12:28.  And this transformation cannot occur unless he himself becomes one of us.

If Jesus is only a man or only God, then we are still dead in our sinful corrupted nature.  It is only when the fullness of God assumes our very nature that we are redeemed and receive adoption as children of God in whom he is well pleased. Gal. 4:5.

his first part of the second article was written in opposition to the teachings of Bishop Arius who saw himself as a faithful orthodox Biblical Christian priest. If we understand his argument we should have a better understanding of what the Creed teaches.

One of the issues Johnson raises without pursuing it too far is that if we believe in one all-powerful good God, then what of evil?

As we looked at last week, the essence of God is beyond all intellectual conception, and therefore God as an Object of study is impossible. But if we begin with God as Persons with whom we can relate through our own existential, ecstatic, eros (as he defines these terms in section 6) experience of God, then we can move forward.