I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord…
The belief to which the Christian is called in the person of Jesus Christ is a blessed assurance and trust in and on the finished work of the incarnate second Person of the Trinity as the substitutionary atonement for men’s sins.
The Athanasian Creed describes the hypostatic union of His person thus:
That we believe and confess
that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son,
is both God and human, equally.
He is God from the essence of the Father,
begotten before time;
and he is human from the essence of his mother,
born in time;
completely God, completely human,
with a rational soul and human flesh;
equal to the Father as regards divinity,
less than the Father as regards humanity.
Though not a creed in the conciliar sense, the above portion of the Athanasian Creed may, on the subject of Christ’s hypostasis, be unsurpassed in clarity and exactitude, save for Chalcedon’s precision. As with the historic creeds, generally, it arose as a reactionary ruling against the errors of the day: Athanasius himself, contemporaneous to the acceptance of this pseudepigraphical work under his name, was embroiled in the debates leading up to the Nicene Council. Presbyters from across the Roman world and beyond convened to assert Christian orthodoxy against all subordinationist heresies, not least of which was state-sponsored Arianism. Where the Christians maintained the biblical doctrine of the incarnation in both the full divinity and full humanity of Christ, the empire sponsored doctrines which would subordinate the Church to secular government by diminution of Christ, the King of kings, and His authoritative law-word.
As is the imperial inclination, the government of the time sought means to rewrite Christianity so as to promote multiculturalism under an all-powerful mega-state:
Such a theology becomes a form of the old imperial theology, and politics again become the source of ethics. In orthodox Christianity, ethics is derived from religion, from theology, but in paganism and in subordinationist heresies ethics is derived from politics because man is governed by a political theology, i.e., the state is the functioning voice and agency of its god. . . . Every approach to Arian unitarianism was an approach also to religious universalism. Christianity would cease to be Christianity and would become another of the many syncretistic faiths of the day. . . . All religions are thus given dignity and Christ reduced to one among many natural strivings toward the final unity.1
Emperor Constantine, who had arranged for the convention at Nicea, had also paid Arius to overrule and rewrite Christianity, because inasmuch as he was acting as a strongman to impose God’s dominion, he also glimpsed how apt and powerful Christianity was to depose strongmen such as himself. (And this very thing would later be proven when Bishop Ambrose barred Emperor Theodosius from communion and compelled him to penance for his illicit use of power.) Constantine had come to understand the weightiness of the faith which God had used him to establish in the land. Orthodox Christianity could indeed depose emperors. Orthodox Christianity was opposed to political empires in general, so the imperial impulse of Constantine was to redeem and reconstruct men according to Christlaw. While leaving Constantine’s government apparatus intact, this is similar to the qualified endorsement of Christianity in Hitler’s National Socialist platform – that Christianity was recognized as the state religion so long as Christianity served the state. Rather than Christianizing government, Arianism would merely christen it, baptizing the Babelite model by executive fiat.
It must have galled him bitterly to reflect upon the words he reported from his vision of the cross on the face of the sun years prior on the eve of battle: “In hoc signo vinces.” In this sign, conquer. His late endorsement of Arianism was a reaction against being conquered himself, by the God under whose banner he had conquered others.
Of signal import, too, is the name by which we know Him: Jesus Christ. We do not find need to insist on a particular Hebrew pronunciation, as the Sacred Name movement and the so-called Messianic Jews do (Joshua, Jehshua, Yeshua, Yahshua, Y’hah’shua, etc.), for even the New Testament authors wrote His name in a Greek approximation, Iesous. But we do still find the name by which we speak of Him significant. Though it is no taboo amongst Mestizo Romanists, White Protestants have ever been repelled by the idea of naming a child after the Savior, Jesus. While this reverence is imparted without much overt catechetical direction, the conviction itself stems from the nature of Christ’s unique priestly status which Hebrews 7:24 describes as aparabatos, “untransferable,”which, according to Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon means “not liable to pass to a successor.” That, and when we see reference to antichrists in scripture, recognizing its meaning as “other christs,” we avoid any such connotation for our children.
This name “Jesus” is the English variant of the Latin Jesu (pronounced “Yesu”). It is of particular note that in the first century, when the Greek and/or Latinate Christians first arrived with the name Iesous or Jesu on their lips, they encountered a people who had always worshiped deity under the same name: Yesu. What’s more, they had always worshiped Yesu as the second iteration of a triadic deity represented by a cross. Integral to their religion was that they long awaited the incarnation and atonement of sin to free them from their types and shadows, redeem their souls, and grant them bodily resurrection. This was Druidism: nothing short of Noahic religion preserved in bardic tradition.
Because of the unmistakable similarity as well as the seeming fulfillment of their own prophecy in the advent of Christ, the first-century Druids converted en masse, founding the Culdee church, a Celtic See, arising apart from the exclusive succession claimed by the Roman Magisterium. Despite Christianity being declared the national religion of Britain in AD 156, Rome waged a pitiless war on the Culdee church for hundreds of years in attempts to expunge the British claim to have received the gospel commission at the hands of Christ’s disciples outside of Roman succession, because the Culdee church recognized no papal jurisdiction in their lands. All of which is sufficiently well-documented that I will abstain from proving the case here; but to any so interested I offer hearty endorsement of Isabel Hill Elder’s book, Celt, Druid and Culdee, wherein the author concludes with this passage from a Rev. John Pryce:
There was hardly a feature of their national character in which it would not find a chord answering and vibrating to its touch. . . . [T]he preaching of Jesus and the Resurrection would appeal with irresistible force. There was no violent divorce between the new teaching and that of their own Druids, nor were they called upon to reverse their ancient faith but to lay it down for a fuller and more perfect revelation.2
As regards Christ’s Sonship, we reflect again upon the hereditary tropes through which the economic Trinity is revealed: the familial relation of Father and Son from whom proceeds one Holy Spirit, forever residing in a segregated and holy communion all their own. Man enters therein only by proxy of Him who is wholly God and Man, our High Priest, Christ Jesus (John 14:6).
This economy is unknowable to us aside from certain epistemological apparatuses which God built into mankind as the imago Dei. Human society was thus organized originally to reflect the society of the Godhead itself, as a patriarchal, lineal, and image-bearing society with distinctions of persons and offices. As Rushdoony said, “The state cannot give meaning or function; it must itself derive meaning and direction from a free society under God, one able to realize itself in terms of its image mandate.”3
Not without reason, then, does that familial-image mandate, in which kind gather to like kind, suffuse the creation ordinance and the Scripture, for they facilitate men’s understanding of their Creator in whose image they were made.
And Christ’s title as “Lord” stands as proclamation of His full deity, wholly communicative of the other members of that holy community in Trinity. As He said, “he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).
However, we see also in Scripture, “Not everyone who saith unto Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt.7:21), because there are many lords (1 Cor. 8:5). The foremost case of this is found to have long plagued Israel under the name Baal. This name is simply the Babylonian equivalent of “the lord,” yet the prophet Elijah called a theological duel with the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18) which resulted in the execution of hundreds of the prophets of that false lord. Baal, though simply the word “lord” in a tongue foreign to Israel, is then obviously an inappropriate term of reference for the true God.
In light of the fact that our word “Lord” isn’t the original term in the text either, but rather an English parallel for Adonai or the tetragrammaton (YHWH), it raises the question: why is our iteration appropriate and the term “Baal” inappropriate? Our word, coming from the old English laverd, means simply, “the master of the house.” It is a masculine/patriarchal term which declares allodial domain and the right of a patriarchal freeholder to his jurisdiction. This is quite different from Baal (and Allah), the meaning of which is inextricably tied into the mystery religions which, as Rev. Hislop has so well demonstrated in his The Two Babylons, sprang originally from the imperial cult of Nimrod, the Hamite emperor of Babel (Gen. 10:8-10).
Christ’s Lordship in the creed is a declaration that He is Master of His house, the absolute potentate over His jurisdiction, which encompasses all things of His making, heaven and earth, the entirety of the cosmos, visible and invisible, spiritual and fleshly, all beneath His creation ordinance. But false lords such as Baal propose to usurp, revolutionize, and transform that creation into an artificial empire, unrecognizable. False lords, after the pattern of Babel, are inclined to impose their fantasy visions upon the world from above in the mock-providence of all powerful god-states, whereas the true Lord’s Kingdom, not of this world, but ruling over it, and undergirding it, nonetheless permeates the creation from the atomic level up, aligning the world to the harmony for which it was designed under God.
Read Part 5
Footnotes
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