Jesus, the Person
All the theological wrangling of the early centuries of the Church begs the question - why was there so much ado about Christ? Can't we just grant there are many things we don't understand and live with the ambiguity?
This concern was inherited from the apostles themselves. Paul had warned the Corinthians against the message of "false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ" who preach "a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached... or a different gospel from the one [they] accepted," 2Cor.11:4, 13. A false Jesus leads necessarily to a false gospel.
A Jesus less than fully divine cannot satisfy the justice of an infinitely holy God. A Jesus less than fully human cannot represent sinful humanity as our kinsman redeemer. And so, though the controversies were at times not pleasant, as Louis Berkhof writes, "The Holy Spirit was guiding the Church... into the clear atmosphere of the truth," The History of Christian Doctrine, 101.
Having said all this, it may seem somewhat ironic then to realize that the Apostle's Creed does not dwell on the abstract subtleties of the two natures of Christ in one person - that truth has been ensconced in other creedal statements - but the space it devotes to Him does reflect His importance to Christian belief.
What does the creed say about Him? Alister McGrath in his commentary on the creed, I Believe, says, "The focus of the creed is on the name and relevance of Jesus Christ," which, for most of us are things a bit more easy to ge a hold of. He continues by making the very meaningful observation that at the very heart of the Christian faith is a Person, not a set of abstract ideas or beliefs. He says -
"We must resist the temptation to speak about Christianity as if it were some 'ism,' like Buddhism, Freudianism or Marxism. These are essentially abstract systems that have become detached from the person of their founder and reduced to sets of ideas or doctrines... The relationship between Jesus and Christianity is very different. To begin with Buddha, Freud and Marx are all dead - yet Christianity knows its head as living and risen from the dead."
"Christians have always insisted that there is something qualitatively different about Jesus that sets him apart from other religious teachers or thinkers. There is a vitally close connection between the person and the message of Jesus. It is what Jesus did and the impact He made on those who encountered Him that make His message important. From the very beginning Christians realized that Jesus just could not be treated as an ordinary human being. In Jesus the message and the messenger are one and the same." P.38.
And so the creed reminds us in true evangelical fashion that the gospel calls us to a relationship with a person - a very special Person - the Son of God who has given His own life for us and been raised again.
