Introduction to Christianity

Belief in the World of Today

Genuine belief and genuine unbelief are not sealed worlds but share the same underlying uncertainty; the word ‘credo’ names a fundamental human option for the primacy of the invisible and the received over the visible and the made, which must be renewed continually as an act of conversion.

• Both the believer and the unbeliever inhabit a shared condition of irreducible uncertainty: the believer is always threatened by the abyss of doubt, while the unbeliever can never fully extinguish the ‘perhaps’ of faith — making doubt the paradoxical avenue of communication between them.
  • St. Thérèse of Lisieux, apparently cocooned in complete religious security, wrote from her deathbed that she was ‘assailed by the worst temptations of atheism’ and felt herself in sinners’ shoes — revealing that even the most integrated faith rests over an abyss.
  • Martin Buber’s story of the Rabbi of Berditchev illustrates the point: confronted with a learned skeptic, the rabbi offered no proofs but simply said, ‘Perhaps it is true’ — and this ’terrible perhaps’ broke the skeptic’s resistance.
• The word ‘credo’ (I believe) designates not a theory but a second mode of access to reality: the decision that the invisible is more real than the visible and that meaning — unlike practical knowledge — cannot be manufactured but only received.
  • Unlike Old Testament ’law’ or Roman religio (careful observance of rites), Christianity centers itself in the word ‘belief’, implying a fundamental about-turn in which the visible world’s claim to totality is refused.
  • Belief is structurally analogous to the Hebrew root ‘amen’, which combines the meanings: truth, firmness, firm ground, loyalty, trust, and standing — so that faith appears as the discovery of a ground that upholds rather than something man constructs.
• Modern culture presents a specific double obstacle to faith beyond the generic gulf between visible and invisible: first, the triumph of the historical-critical approach (verum quia factum — truth as what man has made), which displaced metaphysics; second, the subsequent triumph of techne (verum quia faciendum — truth as what can be made), which displaced even history.
  • Giambattista Vico’s formula ‘verum quia factum’ — we truly know only what we have made ourselves — marks the end of the old metaphysics and the beginning of the modern spirit, shifting the domain of real knowledge from being to human historical fact.
  • Marx’s axiom — ‘philosophers have merely interpreted the world; it is necessary to change it’ — took Vico’s historical turn further, replacing the made with the makable as the criterion of truth and installing techne as the dominant intellectual mode.
• Faith belongs to the human act of ‘standing-and-understanding’ rather than to the modern dyad of ‘knowing-and-making’; it is the reception of a meaning that underlies and enables all human activity but cannot itself be manufactured.
  • Even Marxism cannot square the circle: it cannot convert its promise that man’s makable future is his purpose into demonstrable knowledge — it can only assert this and invite belief, thus covertly depending on the very act of faith it claims to replace.
  • Baron Münchhausen’s absurd attempt to pull himself out of the bog by his own hair accurately mirrors the human situation: meaning that is self-made is no meaning at all; it must be received from a ground that precedes and upholds us.
• The most personal formula of Christian faith is not ‘I believe something’ but ‘I believe in you’ — faith is the finding of a divine ‘You’ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, which transforms belief, trust, and love into a single act.
  • In Jesus’ life from the Father and his unconditional devotion to humanity, the meaning of the world becomes present as a person — not merely as an idea or ethical system — guaranteeing an indestructible love that points beyond all unfulfilled human encounter.
  • Even this personal faith requires continual questioning — ‘Are you really he?’ was asked by John the Baptist himself in a dark hour — so that the reflections of the whole book are ordered to the basic confession: ‘I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth, as the logos of the world and of my life.’

The Ecclesiastical Form of Faith

The Apostles’ Creed, rooted in the baptismal dialogue of the early Church, shows that faith is not a private intellectual conclusion but an ecclesial, sacramental, and word-structured act of conversion; its designation as ‘symbolum’ expresses that faith is essentially communal, dialogic, and ordered toward the unity of those who profess it.

• The Apostles’ Creed originated not as an abstract doctrinal document but as the triple ‘I believe’ of the baptismal dialogue, making the act of faith structurally a conversion — an about-turn of the whole person accomplished in the interplay of question and answer, renunciation and assent.
  • The threefold structure of the Creed mirrors the threefold baptismal immersion based on Matthew 28:19; the original form of three questions (‘Do you believe…?’) and three answers (‘I do believe’) expresses more accurately the dialogic nature of faith than the later continuous ‘I’-form.
  • The dramatic fourth- and fifth-century controversies over who Christ is were not metaphysical hair-splitting but arguments about what really happens when someone becomes a Christian — what shift of being is accomplished, what estimate of reality is adopted.
• Faith ‘comes from hearing’ (Romans 10:17) not merely as a historical accident but as a structural truth: unlike philosophy — where thought precedes and creates its own words — belief is the reception of a word that comes from outside, forestalling the believer and preserving a permanent priority of the given over the self-generated.
  • Because the word of faith has this priority over thought, the social and communal character of faith is not a secondary organizational matter but belongs to its very structure: the primary factor is the proclaimed word that unites, whereas philosophical thinking begins in solitude and only secondarily seeks companions.
  • The difference in religious ’endowment’ among persons — some receiving direct religious experience, most depending on the testimony of others — is not a defect in the divine plan but a consequence of the dialogic structure of faith, which operates through human witness and community.
• The Creed’s ancient name ‘symbolum’ (from symballein, to throw/fit together) reveals that Christian doctrine was never intended as a series of isolated propositions but as the means of mutual recognition and unity — each believer holds the faith as a broken half that only becomes whole in communion with others.
  • The Greek practice of breaking a token whose two halves identified host and guest illuminates the Creed’s function: it is not primarily a definition but an instrument of recognition and fellowship, pointing always beyond itself to the Other it cannot fully contain.
  • Karl Rahner’s insight that dogmatic formulas are intrinsically word-forms whose significance lies partly in their capacity to unite people in common confession — not merely in their intellectual content — reflects the symbolum’s original purpose.
• Christianity is not a system of ideas (Platonism for the people) but a way — its truth is not speculative content separable from community but is embodied in the historical ‘We’ of the Church, so that entering the faith means entering fellowship, not merely acquiring a correct worldview.
  • Marius Victorinus, the Neoplatonist who thought he already possessed Christianity’s content in philosophy and needed no Church, eventually joined — recognizing that philosophy offers an idea of truth while Christianity offers truth as a way that makes a claim on existence and requires embodiment in a community.
  • Christian belief is not mind existing for itself but ‘incarnation, mind in the body of history and its We’ — it is obedience and service, the liberation of being taken into service for the whole.

Prolegomena to the Subject of God

The question of God is the most persistent question in human history, arising from two basic sources of religious experience — the fullness and poverty of existence — and taking three main historical forms (monotheism, polytheism, atheism), all of which share the conviction that being is ultimately one, differing only in how they understand humanity’s relation to that unity.

• Religious experience arises from two complementary sources — the fullness of existence (beauty, love, gratitude for unearned gift) and its poverty (loneliness, limit, the horizon of death) — and neither source is more legitimate than the other; God appears both as ‘God the Son’ (the near, saving, personal) and as ‘God the Father’ (the transcendent, cosmic, creative).
  • Dutch phenomenologist van der Leeuw’s paradox that ‘God the Son was there before God the Father’ expresses the existential priority of the saving, personal God over the distant Creator in concrete religious life, even though both are equally ancient in history.
  • Loneliness is a primal root of the encounter with God: every human ‘You’ finally proves ‘an unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise’ (Claudel), pointing the person toward the absolute You that can truly descend into the depths of the ‘I’.
• The three major forms of human response to the question of God — monotheism, polytheism, atheism — are not as opposed as their labels suggest; all three share the conviction of the ultimate unity and oneness of being, differing only in whether this absolute is conceived as personal consciousness, impersonal matter, or a plurality pointing to an underlying one.
  • Marxism, the most influential form of modern atheism, asserts the unity of being most strictly by declaring all being to be matter — yet in doing so it grants matter features of absoluteness that recall the concept of God it rejects.
  • Even polytheism in antiquity never took the many gods as the final absolute; behind them stood either a supreme power or an eternal conflict of two principles — polytheism could therefore coexist with both philosophical monotheism and philosophical atheism.
• Israel’s confession ‘Yahweh, thy God, is an only God’ was not a metaphysical theorem but an existential decision — a declaration of war on the threefold worship of bread, love, and power that enslaves humanity, and the only definitive protection against the absolutizing of any political collective.
  • Christians in the Roman Empire refused even the most innocuous forms of imperial cult — signing donor lists for sacrifices — not out of fanaticism but because the profession of one God shattered the political principle’s claim to totality: ‘He has put down the mighty from their thrones’ (Luke 1:52).
  • The unity and indivisibility of love between man and woman can ultimately only be made real in the light of belief in the one indivisible love of God; the prophets’ depiction of Israel’s apostasy as adultery reflects not merely metaphor but an inner structural connection between monotheism and faithful love.

The Biblical Belief in God

The biblical name ‘Yahweh’ — interpreted through the burning bush episode, the God of Israel’s fathers, and its culmination in John’s Gospel — holds together two seemingly opposed elements: the God of nearness and invocability (personal, named, present) and the God of pure Being (transcendent, hidden, resisting all naming), a paradox resolved only in the person of Jesus Christ as the living name of God.

• The burning bush episode in Exodus 3 does not straightforwardly reveal God’s name but performs a kind of negative theology: God’s ‘I am who I am’ functions more as a rebuff to Moses’ demand for a name than as a name, dissolving the request into mystery and marking God as the one who cannot be placed alongside other gods.
  • Parallel passages in Judges 13:18 and Genesis 32:30 — where God similarly refuses to give his name, saying ‘Why do you ask my name? It is wonderful/secret’ — confirm that the gesture in Exodus is one of refusal, not disclosure in the ordinary sense.
  • Israel’s increasingly careful avoidance of pronouncing the divine name, leading to the Greek Bible replacing ‘Yahweh’ entirely with ‘Lord’ (Kyrios), was not a loss of meaning but a more accurate grasp of the burning bush’s lesson: the name, a sign of acquaintance, becomes a cipher for God’s perpetual unknownness.
• The pre-Mosaic ‘God of the Fathers’ (El/Elohim) established the decisive option of Israel’s faith: choosing a numen personale over a numen locale — a God known on the plane of I-and-You relationship rather than tied to sacred places — and thereby establishing the basis for a personal, portable, and universal deity.
  • El in the Semitic world was characterized as the social, personal God — father, creator, king, wise one — rather than a local fertility deity, and was also understood as the highest God transcending all other powers, features that Israel adopted and radicalized.
  • Israel’s rejection of Baal (lord/fertility god) and Moloch/Melech (king-god) meant refusing both the spatial limitation of deity to fertility cycles and the aristocratic distance of despotic kingship — the God of Israel was the near-at-hand God available to every person.
• In Deutero-Isaiah, the ‘I am’ formula becomes the axis of prophetic proclamation — God who ‘is’ in the midst of the passing of nations and gods — and this line reaches its New Testament climax in John’s Gospel, where ‘I am’ becomes simultaneously the central Christological formula and the living revelation of the divine name in the person of Jesus.
  • Deutero-Isaiah’s proclamation ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no God’ (Isaiah 44:6) uses the enigmatic ‘I am’ to contrast Yahweh’s abiding reality with the collapse of Babylonian power, turning what seemed a cipher into the ground of Israel’s hope.
  • In John 17, the ‘high priestly prayer’, Jesus appears as the one who has ‘manifested your name’ to humanity — not by speaking a word but by being it — so that Christology becomes the full exposition of what a name of God can mean: the rendering of God invocable through a person.
• A ’name’ of God serves a fundamentally different purpose from a ‘concept’ of God: where a concept grasps the nature of a thing in itself, a name establishes invocability — it draws the other into a relationship of fellowship — and Jesus Christ fulfills what any mere name could only approximate, since in him God has permanently entered into coexistence with humanity.
  • The name differs from the concept in that it does not ask what something is in itself but enables it to be addressed and called upon; through naming, a being enters the structure of fellow humanity and can be invoked — which is what Israel’s God always sought to be for his people.
  • When John presents Jesus as the living name of God, the name is ’no longer just a word at which we clutch; it is now flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone’ — God’s coexistence with humanity is no longer a matter of verbal invocability but of incarnate presence.

The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers

Early Christianity’s decisive option for the God of the philosophers over the gods of religion was a bold and necessary move — the choice of logos over myth — but it simultaneously transformed the philosophical God, who had been a self-enclosed concept, into the God of love and relationship revealed in Jesus Christ, thereby overcoming both the divorce of reason from piety that destroyed ancient religion and any reduction of God to pure abstract Being.

• Early Christianity made a radical choice: against all the gods of existing religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers — the one ground of being — a choice that appeared to contemporaries as atheism but was in fact the most consistent option for truth over custom, logos over myth.
  • The ancient world itself knew the tension between philosophical knowledge of God and mythological religion; Plato criticized Homer’s myths, and Jewish prophets criticized the gods of Canaan — both movements converge in a striving toward logos, making the Christian option not alien to but a culmination of these parallel tendencies.
  • “Tertullian’s axiom — ‘Christ called himself truth, not custom’ — captures the patristic decision: where Roman religion had made the idolization of ancestral custom (consuetudo Romana) a sufficient substitute for truth, Christianity staked everything on truth itself.” —Tertullian
• By identifying the God of faith with the God of the philosophers, Christianity simultaneously and radically transformed that philosophical God: the neutral, self-enclosed Aristotelian unmoved mover was revealed to be agape — creative love in relationship — a God defined not by autarchy but by relatedness.
  • Pascal’s night of fire — where he distinguished the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ from the ‘God of the philosophers and scholars’ — was a genuine experience, but it need not imply that the two are simply opposed; rather, when properly understood, the God of the philosophers turns out to be quite different from what philosophers had assumed, revealing himself as the burning bush.
  • “Hölderlin’s aphorism captures the Christian revaluation: ‘Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est’ — not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest, is divine — so that the omnipotent God’s greatness appears precisely in his concern for the infinitely small.” —Friedrich Hölderlin
• The Apostles’ Creed’s juxtaposition of ‘Father’ and ‘Almighty’ (pantokrator) expresses the central paradox of the Christian image of God: absolute power and absolute love, infinite distance and immediate proximity are held together, and the meaning of ‘almightiness’ is only properly understood from the crib and the Cross — where omnipotence freely chooses complete powerlessness.
  • The Greek pantokrator translates the Old Testament ‘Yahweh Zebaoth’ (Lord of hosts/powers), originally contrasting God with Babylonian star-gods by declaring him Lord of all cosmic powers — a cosmic and then political title that is now paradoxically inhabited by the crucified man of Nazareth.
  • It is only at the Cross that a new concept of power and lordship is born: the highest power demonstrates itself as the willingness to renounce all power, and proves itself powerful not through force but through the freedom of love that is stronger than earthly violence even when rejected.

Faith in God Today

To say ‘I believe in God’ today is to make three interconnected decisions: for the primacy of logos (meaning and spirit) over matter, for the personal and relational character of ultimate reality, and — following the inner logic of these commitments — for a God who is not simple oneness but triune, since the highest unity is the unity of love rather than the unity of the atom.

• Belief in God means, as a first option, affirming the primacy of the logos — that thought and meaning are not chance by-products of matter but that all being is structured by and from a creative intelligence, making human knowledge a ’re-thinking’ of what has already been thought.
  • “Einstein’s remark that the laws of nature reveal ‘an intelligence so superior that in comparison all the significance of human thinking is a completely worthless reflection’ points toward the God of the philosophers — but stops short of the God of faith because its mathematical method abstracts from beauty, morality, and personal relation.” —Albert Einstein
  • James Jeans’s observation that the universe shows traces of a power that thinks ‘in a way we call geometry’ illustrates both the genuine insight of natural science into the logos-structure of being and its intrinsic limitation: the physicist who asks only mathematical questions can find only mathematical answers.
• The Christian option for a personal God means that the highest possibility of being is not self-enclosed autarchy but relationship; this makes freedom — including the incalculability it implies and the risk of evil it entails — the structural form of all being.
  • If the Logos of all being is consciousness, freedom, and love — if being is held together ‘from above’ rather than from below by material necessity — then the world can never be completely reduced to mathematical logic; the somber mystery of the demonic belongs inescapably to a world whose ultimate structure is freedom.
  • Christianity’s distinguishing mark from both materialism and idealism lies in its affirmation that the creative mind has released what it thought into the freedom of independent existence — creation is not the unfolding of one consciousness but the gift of real distinct being by a creative freedom that creates further freedoms.
• The affirmation of the personal character of ultimate reality carries a further implication: that the particular has primacy over the universal, that person is more than individual, and that — since oneness is not the highest value — plurality has its own primordial right grounded in God himself, leading by inner necessity to the doctrine of the triune God.
  • Greek thought regarded individual creatures as secondary reproductions of universal ideas split by matter; Christian faith’s passage from ‘individual’ to ‘person’ — where the unique and unrepeatable is not a diminished copy of the universal but itself the maximum — marks the full span of the transition from Platonism to faith.
  • If the minimum can be a maximum, if the person has primacy over the universal, and if God’s being is love rather than self-enclosed oneness, then simple monotheism — God as inflexible single unity — must be transcended: the authentic unity is the unity created by love, which is multi-unity, not the indivisibility of the atom.

Belief in the Triune God

The doctrine of the Trinity arose not from speculation but from the Church’s effort to account faithfully for the historical experiences of encountering God as Father, as Son in Jesus, and as Spirit — and its formulas, understood as negative theology in the form of ‘complementary’ statements, express the revolutionary insight that relation is as primordial as substance, and that pure unity is the unity of love rather than the unity of the indivisible.

• The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise from metaphysical speculation about the divine nature but from the attempt to faithfully account for three distinct historical encounters: with God as Father/Creator, with Jesus who addresses God as ‘You’ yet is himself God, and with the Spirit who is God’s presence in the innermost being of believers.
  • The crucial question the early Church faced was whether the Trinity of forms in which God appeared in history is merely a ‘mask’ (as Monarchianism held) or tells us something real about God himself — and on this question hinges whether prayer, worship, and encounter with God are genuine or only reflections of human consciousness.
  • ‘God is as he shows himself; God does not show himself in a way in which he is not’ — this is the bedrock assertion on which the doctrine of the Trinity rests, and it simultaneously grounds the possibility of real prayer, real worship, and genuine human encounter with the divine.
• Both major ancient heresies about Christ — Subordinationism (Christ is not fully God but a lesser being) and Monarchianism (the three Persons are only masks or roles of one God) — are dead ends: the first cuts man off from real contact with God; the second reduces prayer to a monologue of human consciousness with itself.
  • Subordinationism makes God into a constitutional monarch who deals with humanity only through ministers — an intermediate being who, if not fully God, cannot truly mediate God but only deepens the distance.
  • Hegel and Schelling revived Monarchianism philosophically by making the historical self-revelation of God identical with God’s own self-realization in history — a position Marx then secularized by declaring that meaning lies in humanity’s self-made future rather than in any preceding logos.
• Augustine’s insight that in God ’there are no accidents, only substance and relation’ represents a philosophical revolution: relation is discovered as an equally primordial mode of reality alongside substance, ending the sole dominion of substantialist thinking and opening a new understanding of what it means to be.
  • The Father is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; in himself he is simply God. This means that personhood in the Trinity is pure relatio — the person does not have a relationship but is the relationship, existing only as relatedness.
  • Schrödinger’s quantum mechanical description of matter as ‘parcels of waves’ — being with no static substance, only patterns of movement — provides a physical analogy for the theological insight of God as pure actus, absolutely ‘in act’, subsisting as a multitude of relations that constitute rather than inhabit a unity.
• John’s Gospel develops a ‘Son’ Christology in which the Son’s total relatedness — ’the Son can do nothing of his own accord’ — is not a diminishment but the precise form of his unity with the Father; and this becomes simultaneously the pattern of Christian existence, whose goal is to live the same structure of pure ‘from’ and ‘for’.
  • John 17’s high priestly prayer — ’that they may be one even as we are one’ — offers Christian unity not as an organizational achievement but as the corollary of Christology: where Christians cease to cling to individual self-assertion and live as pure relatedness (mission, service, openness), they participate in the trinitarian unity that is their ground.
  • “Augustine’s paradox on John 7:16 — ‘Mea doctrina non est mea’ (My teaching is not mine) — illuminates the trinitarian structure of human existence itself: ‘What is so much yours as yourself, and what is so little yours as yourself?’ The ‘I’ is simultaneously what one has completely and what belongs least of all to oneself.” —Augustine of Hippo
• The doctrine of the Trinity functions necessarily as negative theology — as a ‘frontier notice’ pointing to unchartable territory — and every one of its key formulas (persona, homoousios, ‘proceeding’) was condemned before being accepted, their very condemnation forming an intrinsic part of their meaning as ‘poor stammering utterances’.
  • Jansenist Saint-Cyran’s remark that faith consists of ‘a series of contradictions held together by grace’ anticipates the modern physicist’s law of complementarity: just as light must be described simultaneously as wave and particle from irreconcilable perspectives, God must be described simultaneously from irreducible angles that together constitute a more adequate reference to the whole.
  • Heresies are not merely dead ends but ‘ciphers for abiding truths’ — each one-sided position that was rejected nonetheless captured a genuine aspect of the mystery, so that the history of trinitarian controversy is less a graveyard than a building site whose condemned materials were necessary to the final structure.

“I Believe in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord”

Faith in Jesus Christ rests on the indivisible unity of the two words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’: his person IS his work, his existence IS his mission, and this total identification of being and act — rooted in Jesus’ own Abba-prayer and the event of the Cross — is the ground of both his Sonship and the coincidence of faith and love in Christian existence.

• Modern theology’s oscillation between ‘Jesus’ (the historical figure) and ‘Christ’ (the kerygmatic Lord) reflects a false dilemma; in reality the two are inseparable, because Jesus only subsists as the Christ and the Christ only subsists as the man Jesus — their fusion in ‘Jesus Christ’ expresses the identity of person and work that is the core of Christology.
  • Harnack’s liberal reduction — ‘Not the Son but only the Father belongs in the Gospel as Jesus preached it’ — seemed to promise unity through love over divisive dogma, but was immediately refuted by historical research showing that the ‘plain Jesus’ of liberal theology was itself a romantic construction, a Fata Morgana induced by the desire to escape the scandal of the particular.
  • Bultmann’s flight to pure kerygma — where only the ‘fact’ of Jesus’ existence matters, not its content — preserved the scandal of particularity but emptied it, leaving a ‘pale ghost’ of the historical Jesus on which no serious edifice could be built.
• The birthplace of Christian faith in Jesus as Christ is the Cross: it was Pilate’s execution notice — proclaiming Jesus as ‘King of the Jews’ in three languages — that became the first christological confession, showing that in the crucified failure the identity of person, word, and mission was revealed as total self-giving.
  • Jesus himself did not directly proclaim himself as Messiah during his ministry; the man who definitively named him thus was Pilate, who in condemning him wrote what became — with paradoxical irony — the earliest public profession of faith, turning the death sentence into a coronation.
  • From the Cross, the community looked back at Jesus’ words and discovered the same concentration: his message was not separable from his ‘I’ — he did not merely have teachings about the Kingdom, he was the Kingdom; his existence was his word.
• The title ‘Son of God’ in the New Testament derives not from Hellenistic myths of divine men but from Old Testament royal theology — where the king is ‘begotten’ as son at his enthronement through divine election — and is applied to the crucified Jesus as the paradoxical fulfillment of a promise too large for any historical king.
  • Psalm 2’s coronation oracle (‘You are my son; today I have begotten you; ask and I will make the nations your heritage’) was always absurdly oversized for the petty kings of Zion — a mockery when addressed to rulers who trembled before Babylon — and inevitably became a hope projected onto the king yet to come.
  • The one true ancient parallel to calling Jesus ‘Son of God’ was the Roman emperor’s title ‘Divi filius’ (son of the divine) — a convergence from the same ancient oriental royal theology — making the martyrs’ refusal to honor the emperor a clash between demythologized and re-mythologized versions of the same political-theological claim.
• Jesus’ self-designation as ’the Son’ — distinct from the title ‘Son of God’ — arose from his unique form of address to God as ‘Abba’ (intimate Father), expressing a personal prayer-relationship of total openness that constitutes his specific being; and it is precisely this total relatedness that is the ground of his unity with the Father.
  • Joachim Jeremias’s linguistic analysis of Jesus’ preserved Aramaic words shows that ‘Abba’ as an address to God was unprecedented in Jewish prayer — its intimacy was felt to be unseemly before the divine — making its preservation by the earliest community a marker of Jesus’ distinctive and unparalleled relationship with God.
  • John’s formula ’the Son can do nothing of his own accord’ (5:19, 30) is not a subordinationist diminishment but the logical expression of the Son-concept: one who in his very being is pure relatedness, holding nothing back for himself, coincides completely with the one from whom he proceeds — pure openness IS pure unity.
• Because Jesus’ person IS his work and his being IS total ‘for’, Christology and soteriology cannot be separated; and because the ‘I’ of Jesus is pure openness rather than self-enclosed autonomy, to believe in him is necessarily to accept love as the content of faith — making the separation of faith from love theologically impossible.
  • Matthew 25’s parable of the Last Judgment redefines the christological confession not as abandonment of love for doctrine but as its deepest implication: the profession of faith in Christ demands recognition of Christ in the least of men, so that ’to profess one’s faith in Christ means to recognize the man who needs me as the Christ in the form in which he comes to meet me here and now’.
  • Bultmann’s actualism — ‘Christ’s Lordship, his Godhood, is in any case only an event’ — stops short of true radicalism: it leaves Jesus’ human being static behind the event of divine encounter, whereas John’s ontology is more radical, affirming that this man’s being itself is pure act, so that the event penetrates and transforms being itself.
• Seven structural laws characterize Christian existence: (1) the primacy of the individual for the sake of the whole; (2) the ‘for’ as the basic form of life; (3) the law of disguise (God appears in the smallest and least); (4) the law of excess/superfluity; (5) finality and hope; (6) the primacy of acceptance over achievement; and (7) all six converge on the single principle of love.
  • Christianity’s apparently paradoxical insistence on one individual (Jesus of Nazareth) as salvation of the whole world is the necessary consequence of its commitment to history and community: precisely because it wants ’the whole’ — the transformation of the collective web of human existence — it must invoke the individual who breaks the power of the anonymous ’they’ by accepting crucifixion rather than conforming.
  • The ’law of excess’ (perisseumon) — present in the miracle of loaves, the wine at Cana, and the Cross itself — reveals that God ‘does not reckon his gifts by the measure’: creation, salvation history, and the Incarnation are all characterized by a superabundance that infinitely surpasses necessity, and only the lover rather than the calculator can understand why this is the divine mode of action.

The Development of Faith in Christ in the Christological Articles of the Creed

The individual christological articles of the Creed — Virgin Birth, Cross, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, Ascension, and Last Judgment — each articulate a specific dimension of the one mystery of Christ, together spanning the full range of human existence from absolute loneliness to perfect communion, and from historical contingency to eschatological fulfillment.

• The Virgin Birth is not primarily about Jesus’ Divine Sonship (which rests on the Abba-Son dialogue, not biology) but is theology of grace: it stands in a long Old Testament series of miraculous births from barren women, all expressing that salvation comes not from human resources but as the gift of God’s creative power entering a situation of human hopelessness.
  • Mary is depicted in Luke’s Annunciation as the ’true daughter of Zion’ and the fulfillment of Old Testament holy women (Judges 5:24, Judith 13:18); the cloud of the Most High that overshadows her recalls the divine presence in the wilderness tent and the Temple — she is the new Temple, the site of God’s definitive entry into history.
  • The theological concept of the ‘physical Divine Sonship’ of Jesus — often cited as linking Christology to the Virgin Birth — in fact uses ‘physical’ in the sense of physis (nature, innate being) to assert Jesus’ ontological derivation from God, which is emphatically not a biological claim and would not be affected if Jesus had been born of a normal human marriage.
• The Cross is not the mechanism of a legal satisfaction paid to an offended God (a distortion of Anselm) but the revelation in history of what God always is: the ‘movement from above to below’, God’s own initiative of love that identifies itself with the condemned and lost — making Christian worship essentially Eucharistia (thankful reception) rather than the offering of human achievements to a demanding deity.
  • In contrast to all pre-Christian cult, which moves from man upward to God bearing compensatory offerings, the New Testament inverts the direction: ‘2 Corinthians 5:19 — God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ — God comes down; the Cross is the expression of divine love’s self-expenditure, not humanity’s payment of a debt.
  • The Letter to the Hebrews interprets Jesus’ death as the ‘one true cosmic liturgy’: all sacrificial history — hecatombs of animals, ritual systems of countless religions — was futile because God does not need things but seeks the one unreplaceable gift, the free Yes of a human person; only Jesus’ total self-giving accomplished what all ritual attempted but could not provide.
• The Descent into Hell expresses what is most characteristic of Holy Saturday in the modern experience: the silence of God, the ‘death of God’ in the sense of his radical hiddenness — and simultaneously the Christian hope that in Christ, God has strode through the gate of the ultimate loneliness that is death, so that hell (loneliness from which no love can reach us) is no longer the last word.
  • Hell is not a cosmographical location but the existential condition of total loneliness — ‘a loneliness that the word love can no longer penetrate’; death is identified with hell in the Old Testament (both called sheol) because death means precisely this absolute aloneness beyond which no ‘You’ can reach.
  • Jesus’ cry of dereliction — ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22) — is described by Ernst Käsemann as ‘a prayer sent up from hell, the raising of the first commandment as a standard in the wilderness of God’s apparent absence’, showing that the content of the descent into hell is not a cosmological myth but the experience of godforsakenness carried to its extreme.
• The Resurrection is not the resuscitation of a physical body but the breakthrough of love past the frontier of death into a new mode of existence (zoe, not bios) — and because love that is stronger than death establishes immortality for all who share in it, the Resurrection of Christ is the ground of the resurrection of all humanity.
  • Paul’s principle in 1 Corinthians 15 — ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ — establishes that the ‘resurrection of the body’ does not mean the restoration of biological bodies; the teaching is about the resurrection of persons into a ‘spiritual body’ (soma pneumatikon), a transphysical mode of the self that has passed through and beyond bios.
  • The Emmaus story encodes a theology of the Resurrection as encounter: the risen Christ remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye and is found only through Scripture interpreted and bread broken — pointing to the two elements of early Christian liturgy (word and Eucharist) as the ongoing form of the Lord’s real presence.
• The Last Judgment preserves two essential truths simultaneously: that responsibility is real (the world’s outcome depends on the decisions of free persons, not on a neutral cosmic drift), and that the judge is Jesus — the brother met in faith — so that judgment is held together with mercy and hope rather than being pure terror.
  • Leo Baeck’s critique of Christian soteriology — pointing to the ‘cruel images’ of Dante’s afterlife where even the best pagans are damned, contrasting with Judaism’s teaching that even pious non-Israelites share eternal bliss — is a serious challenge that the article on judgment must answer by insisting that no one, not even the baptized, is exempt from the universal reckoning.
  • The contrast between the early Christian Maran atha (‘Come, Lord!’) of hope and the medieval Dies irae (‘Day of Wrath’) of terror shows a genuine deformation of the article: when Christ as judge is separated from Christ as companion and brother, judgment degenerates into moralism and the joy that is the breath of Christian life is extinguished.
• Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of cosmic evolution toward an ‘Omega Point’ — where complexity, personalization, and unification converge — provides a contemporary framework for understanding the New Testament’s ’last Adam’ Christology: Jesus is the ’exemplary man’ in whom humanity’s frontier of biological death has already been crossed, inaugurating the definitive future of the species.
  • Paul’s designation of Jesus as the ’last Adam’ (eschatos Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:45) implies that in him the full ‘hominization’ of the creature has been accomplished: the Rubicon dividing mere animal life from logos-existence is finally crossed when the Logos himself becomes man, making full humanity and full divinity inseparable.
  • John 12:32 — ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself’ — presents the Cross as cosmic opening: the crucified Christ with arms outstretched is the primal image of the orante (worshipper) and simultaneously the gesture of all-inclusive brotherhood, showing that theocentricity and anthropocentricity, worship and service, are identical.

The Intrinsic Unity of the Last Statements in the Creed

The third section of the Creed — originally professing faith in Holy Spirit without the definite article — is not primarily a metaphysical statement about the Trinity but an account of God’s operation in the history opened by Christ’s Resurrection, expressed concretely through the sacramental life of the Church (baptism/penance and Eucharist) and pointing toward the final resurrection as the Omega of all history.

• The original Greek text ‘I believe in Holy Spirit’ (without the definite article) indicates that this article was understood primarily in terms of salvation history — the Spirit as God’s transforming power in the post-Resurrection community — rather than as a treatise on the third Person of the Trinity in isolation.
  • The separation of pneumatology (teaching about the Spirit) from ecclesiology produced twin distortions: the Church was understood exclusively from the Incarnation as something too earthbound, while the Spirit’s teaching became homeless — absorbed into speculative Trinitarian theory and stripped of its function for the living Christian consciousness.
  • The ‘communion of saints’ originally referred to eucharistic communion — koinonia in the holy gifts (sanctorum) rather than fellowship among holy persons — defining the Church from her worship rather than her organization: as a community at one table around the risen Christ who gathers the scattered into unity.
• The last words of the Creed — ‘resurrection of the body’ and ’life everlasting’ — are not an appendix but the necessary culmination of faith in the Spirit’s transforming power: because love proved stronger than death in Christ’s Resurrection, the final ‘complexification’ of cosmos and humanity into a personal unity of love is the direction of all history.
  • The Cross as cosmic Omega — ‘because God himself became a mere worm, the last letter in the alphabet of creation, the last letter has become his letter and thereby turned history toward the final victory of love’ — links the theology of kenosis directly to the eschatology of resurrection: the nadir is the turning point.
  • Christian hope is distinguished from both Marxist utopianism and Platonic otherworldliness by its three-dimensional structure: past (the breakthrough already accomplished), present (the eternal that makes divided time into unity), and future (the One who is to come, whose face has already been revealed as the man who exists for others).

Two Major Questions Posed by the Articles on the Spirit and the Church

The holiness and catholicity of the Church must be understood not as empirical descriptions of her members but as designations of God’s gift and call — the Church’s ‘unholy holiness’ mirrors God’s deliberate love for sinners, while catholicity names the visible unity across divisions that is both already given in Word and sacrament and remains a permanent task; and the resurrection of the body means not the restoration of biological matter but the immortality of the person, upheld by God’s love, in fellowship with all humanity.

• The Church’s holiness does not mean the sinlessness of her members but the indestructible gift of God’s sanctifying presence, which paradoxically chooses the ‘dirty hands of men’ as its vessel — making the Church’s unholy holiness the most visible historical form of the grace that pardons the unworthy.
  • William of Auvergne, 13th-century Bishop of Paris, admitted that the Church’s ‘barbarism’ was enough to make observers ‘go rigid with horror’: the tradition of honest ecclesial self-criticism is ancient, and the honest acknowledgment of this constitutes part of the Church’s truth rather than a modern innovation.
  • The Church is ’the continuation of God’s deliberate plunge into human wretchedness’ — just as Jesus sat at table with sinners and was himself ‘made sin’ (2 Corinthians 5:21), the Church’s mingling with human failure is not a betrayal of the holy but its specific form in history: holiness that does not separate but unites.
• The catholicity of the Church names the double unity she is called to embody: local unity (each community united with its bishop is ’the’ Church, not a sectional faction) and universal unity (the many local Churches must remain open to one another in one Word and one eucharistic table) — a visible unity that in a torn world is itself a sign and instrument of reconciliation.
  • The unity of the Church is founded primarily on Word and sacrament — ’the Church is one through the one Word and the one bread’ — and the episcopal organization, including the office of the Bishop of Rome, belongs to the category of means ordered to this sacramental unity rather than being a constitutive end in itself.
  • The Church’s failure to prevent wars between Christian nations and her continuing inability to bridge the gap between rich and poor show how far the claim of catholicity remains an imperative task rather than a settled achievement — but the category itself preserves the obligation.
• The biblical teaching on resurrection is not the Greek doctrine of an immortal soul surviving bodily death, nor the naive resuscitation of biological corpses, but a ‘dialogic immortality’: the person as a whole is upheld in God’s memory and love, which are stronger than death — a collective and communal destiny inseparable from the fellowship of all humanity.
  • The Hebrew word for the afterlife — sheol — is identical with the word for death because ancient Israel understood them as the same reality: absolute loneliness and non-being; the resurrection hope is the exact contrary, affirming that God’s knowing and loving of a person constitutes a real ground of existence that outlasts biological dissolution.
  • Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 about the ‘spiritual body’ (soma pneumatikon) as opposed to the ‘physical body’ (soma psychikon) is far less naive than later Scholastic elaborations of how eternal physical bodies would function: he is teaching the resurrection of persons, not the restoration of biological structures, into a mode of existence modeled on the risen Christ.
• The Christian hope for resurrection is ultimately grounded in love as the only power capable of founding immortality: wherever love is stronger than death — wherever a being holds another in such complete knowledge and love that the other cannot perish — the frontier of bios into zoe has been crossed; and the Resurrection of Christ is the event in which this crossing occurred for all humanity.
  • The New Testament’s two complementary descriptions of the Resurrection — ‘Jesus has risen’ and ‘God (the Father) has awakened Jesus’ — correspond to the two aspects of love-as-ground-of-immortality: Jesus’ total love for humanity, perfected in surrender to the Father, is at the same time his being held by the Father whose love is stronger than death.
  • The goal of the Christian is not private bliss but the whole: because the cosmos is moving toward personal unification through spirit, and because Christ is the ‘omega’ in whom this process has irreversibly begun, even the seemingly Sisyphean labor of human history moves ‘forward’ rather than in circles — a certainty that makes engagement with the world both possible and worthwhile.