Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5; 1 John 4:1; Hebrews 11:3; Ezekiel 18:13; Romans 3:23; Ephesians 2:8; Luke 14:26-27 Series: 2022
Launching a series on the Apostles’ Creed, Wilson uses the grammatical distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs to argue that Christian belief is never a vague ‘I believe’ but always belief in the particular Triune God. Doctrine is what God has revealed about Godself, and confessing ‘I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth’ (Genesis 1:1-5) means God alone is eternal Creator and therefore alone can save; no human institution, nation, family, or economic system is almighty or eternal. He presses this against idolatry (Calvin’s idol factory, Norse myths, a distant Zeus, Rowan Williams vs. Dawkins) and especially against the modern financial system of credit, debt, and interest, which the Bible (Ezekiel 18) condemns. To truly believe God created everything is to receive life as undeserved gift rather than entitlement, to be redeemed rather than affirmed, and to live a transformed life of thanksgiving.
Illustrations: transitive-intransitive-verbs, calvin-idol-factory, norse-mythology-odin, distant-zeus, rowan-williams-dawkins-debate, lemaitre-big-bang, credit-credo-root, comfortable-life-spicewood
October 9
I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth
When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night. There was evening and there was morning: the first day. Genesis 1:1-5
I was an English major in college. I loved studying English in school. I love to read. I love literature. I love creative writing: all these things. But I never really encountered heavy grammar throughout my education. Even at the college level, I never had to diagram a sentence.
I came to appreciate grammar later in life, while I was in seminary, especially in learning Greek and Hebrew. It was in translating and understanding the challenge of translating that I came to appreciate grammar and syntax.
So, as an English major, and as a late to life grammar nerd, I want to bring up a concept that many of you may have forgotten: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. And I know, it’s like, “oh my gosh, pastor Wilson comes back and all he’s doing is giving us grammar lessons.” Well, it is a little more than grammar lessons. For a religion that claims that Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Logos of God, in which we receive the words of God in Scriptures, the language itself matters. The grammar matters. The syntax matters if we actually wish to understand what God is speaking to us today. It matters tremendously for the life of faith. What are we talking about when we talk about God? That’s the issue of what is referred to as doctrine or theology? What do we talk about when we talk about God? Doctrine isn’t about us or what we do or don’t do or should do or shouldn’t do. Doctrine is what God has revealed to us about Godself. Doctrine is about God, full stop. Doctrine is what has been revealed about God, full stop.
An issue of central importance is to make sure that we are talking about God and not talking about an idol of our own creation. As John Calvin said, the human heart is an idol factory. We create idols for everything. From the beginning of time, humans have created idols about everything. You can’t go a paragraph in the Old Testament without the Hebrew people receiving a promise, turning away, building an Idol, God rebuking and forgiving them, and the cycle starts again.
As well, belief or faith are often spoken in an intransitive way which is incoherent for Christian faith.
For a grammar nerd refresher course, a transitive verb has a direct object and an intransitive verb does not. For instance, run, rain, die, sneeze, sit, smile, these are intransitive verbs. To say, “I run” or “it rains” is to make a complete sentence. A transitive verb needs an object, like the verbs borrow, bring, promise, have, believe. Sometimes, we can say “I believe”, or “I have faith” in an intransitive way, but that is incoherent. It is totally incoherent. And it opens us up to that human heart idle factory. This is the vacuity of people today who say they are spiritual and not religious. In which spirits are you connected? In which way are you not religious? In what do you believe? In what do you have faith?
The question matters deeply: are we talking about the Triune God, the Father with the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, or are we talking about something else? 1John 4 tells us to not “have faith in every spirit but to] test the spirits—whether they are from God.”
The claim of Christianity is not that there exists some ephemeral spirituality that we all have access to and which compels us to be a little kinder. No. This claim is concrete and summarized here in the Apostles’ Creed.
Series Intro
We are starting series on the apostles creed, the historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.
The first word in the Latin of the creed, spoken in the underground baptistries of the ancient world. is Credo, which is a first person, singular verb. I believe, I believe in God Credo in Deum. I believe in God.
Which God, what do we mean by God? Credo in Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem cæli et terræ, I believe in God, the Father almighty maker of the heaven and earth, of the skies and the lands.
The Creed begins, as the Bible begins, with Genesis. It begins with God, the Father, before creation. It begins with a statement about creation. A statement about creation that has been controversial. Up until the 1920s with Father LeMaitre’s theory of the Big Bang. Most people, most scientists from cultures all over the world, believed in the eternity of the world and the universe. This was true for scientists and for myths around the world. Scientists believed in a steady state universe that was eternal.
Most creation myths viewed the universe as consisting of a human plane and a supernatural plane, with an assortment of deities or gods impacting the human plane. They usually had special powers. A common structure of the mythology of creation comes from the Norse with Thor and Odin and this idea of Asgard the higher land, and midgard, the middle land. Odin, doesn’t create the world, he is a part of it. The gods are within it.
Often people project onto the God of the Bible this mindset, imagining that God is really powerful, but really far away, kind of like a Zeus that doesn’t use lightning bolts as much. They imagine that God is really far away, sometimes controlling us, sometimes not.
That’s not a Christian Religion. At one point, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was in a debate with a very loud atheist, Richard Dawkins, about the nature of God. Rowan was pressed, and he said, if God is just another part of material existence, that God needs to die, that God cannot save us.”
This is why the beginning of the Bible, the beginning of the creed, the beginning of all existence matters. If God is not the creator, God cannot be the savior. If God did not create, God has no power over us or over the world. Sure, such a god might have limited power here and there.. They may have a really cool hammer or catchphrase, but ultimately they have no relationship, no connection, no power to save, no reason in which to believe in them.
Scripture
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
The first act of creation is not light. It’s the making of what is formless. It is the making of the matter out of which creation shall emerge. As Hebrews 11 puts it, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
The universe is not eternal. God is eternal. Now what does that have to do with us today?
I mentioned how this was controversial before the big bang. It still is controversial today, though in a different way. Most scientists would agree that there was a creation event of sorts. Even staunchly atheistic cosmologists would say that prior to the big bang, something was, but we can’t study what was going on, so we can’t say yes or no about it and should avoid the question. “What was there?” Which is fine. If, scientists ever find a picture of God, it is not a picture of the God of the Christian faith who has no material substance.
It is controversial today because to say and believe, I believe in God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, is to say that there’s no human institution that is almighty.
To claim God as Father is not to claim a gender for God but to call God father because “he bears fruit out of himself and requires no fructifying that he is called Father, and not in the sexual sense, for he will be the Creator of man and woman, and thus contains the primal qualities of woman in himself in the same simultaneously transcending way as those of man”1
There’s no human institution that made something from nothing and no human institution that’s eternal: not this city, not this county, not this state, not this country, not this global economic system. None of it is eternal. And none of it can save us.
Credit
The institution in which most people encounter faith, most people all over the world, is not church or religion, but in financial transactions, in this funny little word called credit. Credit, from the same Latin root as credo, I mean, it’s the same verb. Credit is the third person singular, as opposed to the first person singular, instead of ‘I believe.’ Credit is ‘he or she believes’. He or she believes that you are good for your word. And a bank gives you a loan. They believe that you will pay it off. And it is in their interest for you to do that. You pay them interest to keep them interested. When you have a credit card, it is a card in which the bank believes you will pay it back.
This may seem completely separate from religion as you understand it, but the Bible actually has a lot to say about financial transactions. And we all encounter credit in our lives a lot more than credo.
The Bible talks about finances a lot. Land use is a major concern of the old testament. Using just weights is also super important. The Bible talks a lot more about finance than it talks about sex, and the words of the Bible on loans, on interest, on debt, on jubilee, these words speak strongly against our contemporary financial system.
The prophet Ezekiel speaks in the starkest terms. He says that anyone who “lends at interest, and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live. He has done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon himself.” Ezekiel 18:13 ESV. These words of scripture are unambiguous.
This system, which offers great wealth in this country and around the world, is convenient, but it isn’t biblical. It is convenient to believe in the status quo from which we have benefited, but it is not biblical. It is convenient to assume that the word of God speaks harshly to other systems than the one in which find ourselves, but it is not biblical.
To really believe that God is all powerful and created everything is to admit that all our assumptions about how the world works could be washed away through the power of God. I am justified in nothing save Jesus Christ. Not this country or world-system, not my family or my actions. As Paul says in Romans, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And yet as Paul says in Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Even with this radical understanding of grace, Jesus takes it further in the Gospel of Luke. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” There is no ground to stand on save the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.
As the unchangeable doctrine of the United Methodist Church says in Article 1.
“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible.”
What we know of God comes from God. It has been revealed by God. Not on the news or social media; God did not choose those media. Not in biblical values. The bible never talks about values. Values language is a way to avoid actually reading the Bible. God reveals Godself here holding the Bible] and here and here.
To say, I believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, is not to say a thing about the past, but about reality, present reality.
To say I believe in an intransitive way is not to say much at all. My belief could be anything: belief in myself, belief in a sports team, belief in a set of values. But an intransitive belief is never a belief in the Christian God. To say, I believe in God. The father mighty, is a claim about the present reality that we need to live into. We need to live into it in our daily life. By looking at the world, not as this necessary thing, that always was, but as a gift from God. A gift that humans have spurned again and again, but yet still can receive.
To claim concretely our belief in the particular God of the bible is to strike a blow against an idolatry that would deceive us and use us for its own ends. God and faith are not tools to further any political or economic end. God created everything not so that some of us could have a comfortable life in Spicewood, Texas, in 2022. God sent Jesus not to affirm us but to redeem us and this world which is in need of redemption.
My brothers and sisters, receive this gift of faith in God almighty. You are not the savior. You are not the creator. You are made and molded by God. You are loved by God. Your neighbor is loved by God. Your dog is loved by God. The trees are loved and lovingly made by God and seen as good. You have been given a great gift in life. You don’t deserve it. The world owes you nothing. So live as if you have been given a gift, not as if you’re entitled to any of it. Not as if you’re entitled to a society that’s like the one of your childhood, not as if you’re entitled to Christian culture or biblical culture. Jesus doesn’t give us culture but life, redemption, transformation. You have been created by God as a gift. Give thanks and honor that gift by how you live.
Let us pray, Heavenly Father, we thank you for your glorious act in creation. We thank you for the gift of faith and revealing yourself to us. Help us to respond to your grace by living a transformed life offered to others. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Balthasar ↩