Arius: more of a heretic than I thought he was...

Last year in church history we heard about a number of heretics in the early church.

Our lecturer was really great at helping to be sympathetic to them.  That is, to listen carefully to what they say, weigh it carefully, not react to hastily to them, and to see the good things in what they were trying to do.

Arius was a a guy who said that 'there was a time when the Son was not'.  Well today I've been reading a bit of Arius' work for myself.  This is an excerpt in Athanasius' work where he quotes Arius at length.

Moreover he has dared to say, that ‘the Word is not the very God;’ ‘though He is called God, yet He is not very God,’ but ‘by participation of grace, He, as others, is God only in name.’ And, whereas all beings are foreign and different from God in essence, so too is ‘the Word alien and unlike in all things to the Father’s essence and propriety,’ but belongs to things originated and created, and is one of these. Afterwards, as though he had succeeded to the devil’s recklessness, he has stated in his Thalia, that ‘even to the Son the Father is invisible,’ and ‘the Word cannot perfectly and exactly either see or know His own Father;’ but even what He knows and what He sees, He knows and sees ‘in proportion to His own measure,’ as we also know according to our own power. For the Son, too, he says, not only knows not the Father exactly, for He fails in comprehension, but ‘He knows not even His own essence;’—and that ‘the essences of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, are separate in nature, and estranged, and disconnected, and alien, and without participation of each other;’ and, in his own words, ‘utterly unlike from each other in essence and glory, unto infinity.’ 

Cited by Athanisius in Discourses Against the Arians (1.2.6)

I'm struggling to be positive...

Thankfully we can have confidence that Jesus - the Word - is truly God and as such, truly reveals the Father to us.

John 1:1-2

 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God.

John 1:18

18 No one has ever seen God; the only One, who is God,  who is at the Father's side,  he has made him known.

John 14:9

The one who has seen Me has seen the Father.

Who is Jesus Christ for us today?

'Who is Jesus Christ for us today?'

This is a question posed by Bonhoffer in the 1940s.  Today our lecturer posed it to us.

Here's my quick 2 minute answer:

Today Jesus is seen as a byword, a swear word, a nice guy, but an irrelevant guy.  His followers are seen as bigoted, weak and stupid.  However, the reality is that Christ is who he always has been.  He is the ruler of the world.  He is the one who is reconciling all things to the Father.  To those who believe in him, he is their brother, their Saviour and their Lord.

What do you think,  'who is Jesus Christ for us today?'

Self-centredness: not just an issue of TV commentators

[This is post is a little late in coming considering that the Olympics are now well and truly over; however, I thought I'd share something that struck me in a lot conversations and coverage about the Olympics]

When the Olympics were on I heard a lot about two things in particular: 1) about the shock and sadness of Australia's lack of gold medals, and 2) about the awfulness of the channel 9 commentary.  I'm going to focus on the second one.

Many people said to me, "That channel 9 coverage is so irritating", "they're just focussing on the Australians, they're talking them up, putting heaps of pressure on them, and trying to come up with excuses for why they haven't performed as well as they have in the past".  You get the idea.  So many people were frustrated.  People living in Australia from other countries were frustrated because people from their country weren't shown as much, or they didn't even get to see events that Australians weren't in.  The coverage was Australia-centric.  I think even Australians could see the extreme slant of the coverage, and were frustrated that the achievements of others (and even Australians *only* getting a silver medal) weren't rightly celebrated.

We can see that self-centredness is just that.  Putting yourself - or in this case, a nation - at the centre of things.  It is seeing that the world revolves around you. 

Our regular commercial news stations do this too, don't they.  If a plane crashes, we are told how many Australians were on board or injured.  If there is a natural disaster, we are told what happened to the Australians or 'thankfully there were no Australians killed'.  Never mind the fact that countless others have been harmed!!

Please don't mishear what I'm saying; for I love being an Australian.  But I am concerned about this Australia-centredness, for it does not help us to consider others.  It fosters 'looking out for #1' , which is our nation. 

As you can probably tell, my point is that this is not just a problem of our media but is our problem too.  Like the media, we are concerned about what happens to us.  If a news announcement is made about tax reforms, we immediately want to know how we will be affected.  When a train timetable is changed, we look to see if it will affect us. 

At one level this is not a problem.  We would be foolish to not find out information that relates to us.  We would be like an ostrich with our head in the sand.

But I think the problem comes when we just look out for ourselves.  Consider this: if everyone is 'looking out for #1', then there is going to be a lot of conflict.  We don't live in a bubble.  We interact with others.  If we only care for our own needs, not theirs, then we will cause them a lot of hurt.

So if this trait causes a lot of pain, why do we act in this way?  Why are we all by nature self-centred?  Well, this is one way the Bible describes the nature and effect of sin.  Humanity has been corrupted.  One of the ways we express this is to put ourselves in the centre of the world.  We reject God as the centre of the world and replace Him with ourselves. 

We can see this expressed in the "I-ness" of this generation.  It is the age of the i-pad, the i-phone, the i-cloud etc.  Everything is about me.  Everything is about what I want.  I want to choose.  I want to do what I want, when I want it.

Consider then how radical Jesus is.  The Bible says that although he is the one who has all power and authority, he "came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many".  He is the supreme example of selflessness rather than self-centredness.  What's more, we are blessed by his selflessness.  He gave his life as a ransom for us.  We have been bought back by him.  We have been redeemed from our slavery to self-centredness.

Thank you Jesus for rescuing us from our self-centredness.