I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son

Reflection on the Apostles Creed – Part 3

An online friend, let’s call him Joseph, clarified the nature of the God of Catholics when he commented that God is not in the genre of being.

In the words of St Thomas Aquinas, God is “ipsum esse subsistens”, the very act of “to-be” itself. A being has in itself potentiality and cannot initiate its own movement (for example, the Big Bang requires a Banger), but has to be moved; in causality then God becomes the first cause.  
Human “beings”, and indeed all things in the genre of “being”, participate in “being” in a limited way. My friend Joseph quoted Etienne Gilson who said that “our intellect can only grasp that which has a quiddity [the essence of an object, literally its “whatness”] participating in being. But the quiddity of God is being itself.” Thus God transcends the intellect. God’s essence is intellect (ipsum intelligere), and in God also to-be and act are the very essence of existence .

We said we believe in God who created heavens and earth, and in his only begotten son, our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospel is clear about the fact that Jesus Christ is a mystery that cannot be disassociated with the Mystery of God. The Church’s tradition, though accepting this, still does its best to soften the mystery in our eager minds; after all to be alive is to be in the drive for Life and Christ is Life.

The early doctrine of Christianity is mostly written by Saul who changed his name to Paul after an encounter with the risen Christ. What is most striking in St Paul’s teaching is the assertion that Life is Christ (Phil 1:21).

Vatican II’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes is consistent with St Paul: “Christ is himself the cause of the justice and peace we seek. He is the author of peace, the Prince of Peace reconciling all people with God (78). In Christ can be found the key, the focal point and the goal of humanity and of all human history (10); he is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilisation, the centre of the human race, the joy of every heart and the answer to all its yearnings (45). Only in Christ can the human mystery take on light (22). He entered the world’s history as a perfect human, taking that history up into himself and summarising it (38).” In short, Christ is not only just goodness but the very Life by which all exist.

The geopaleontologist Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (pictured above) tried to put this assertion in a language the evolutionist might understand. He tried to reconcile the hypothesis of evolution with faith by claiming that species (including our own) evolve throughout geological time. He argues that a personal God is the divine Centre of an on going evolving creation (in sharp contrast to viewing the entire universe as a completed event that happened only about 6,000 years ago)

For Teilhard, the ongoing evolution of our species is moving toward an Omega point as the end-goal or divine destiny of human evolution on this planet. He maintains that God-Omega is one, personal, actual and transcendent. He claims that the human layer of consciousness, engulfing our earth, is becoming a collective brain and heart that will, in the future as a single mind of persons, be immersed in God-Omega. He said the end-goal of evolution is a final creative synthesis of humankind with the universal God-Omega. Of course, for Christians Christ is the alpha and omega through which all things were created and find life.

Naturalists believe there’s no purpose, no meaningfulness, no free will in this “blind, deterministic universe”. To them what they call “fermions and bosons” is our universe, and then we die without meaning. Yet, according to the Gospel, Jesus Christ reveals God’s meaning about life. And that meaning is transfigured in Christ’s resurrected body where life overcame death – that is, it overcame meaninglessness.

To confess or invoke Jesus as Lord is to believe in his divinity: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit’” (1 Cor 12:3).