ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 13 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Let me continue in this line, if I may. The Nicene Creed is longer than the Apostles Creed. But both seem to say essentially the same thing about Jesus. Yet there are clearly differences besides length, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, just for example. Please tell me about these differences. Do they contradict one another in any way? Do they come into existence in the same way? And what can we learn of Christ from the Nicene Creed? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: The first thing we want to say is there's absolutely no essential difference between the Apostles and the Nicene Creed. Of course there's the matter of length. The second thing we want to say is that our Creeds came into existence in connection with baptism. Even today when a person or a child is being baptized, we ask the child "Do you believe in God, the Father? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his Son? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?" And the response is that those people -- responses that those people gave when they were baptized turned out to be the Creed very much like our Apostles Creed. Now, in the post apostolic church there were any number of Creeds floating about. They weren't all exactly the same. But what is striking, they are quite similar. That if you went from one church to another and heard these Creeds, you would be very, very, very familiar with them. Now, the Apostles Creed has a slightly different emphasis than the Nicene Creed. The question was asked before: What are two general problems that we face about the person of Jesus? And we said the one problem is: Was he really a man? And the other problem is: Was he really God? The first problem that the church had to address: Did God actually become man? And that question is answered for us in the Apostles Creed. In the center of the Apostles Creed is the word only begotten. There were many people who did not believe that the only begotten Son of God was born of a woman, lived like we did, was -- died and was buried. That was the real problem. And so the heart of the Apostles Creed is the earthly life of Jesus. Now, several centuries later another problem arose. And that is was Jesus really God before he was conceived? Oh, they believed that he was some type of supernatural being. He existed before he was born. But was he really God? And that gave rise to the Nicene Creed. If I could change a few things in the Creed, I would like to. And one thing I would like to change is the words God of God, light of light and very God of very God. I'm not so sure it's going to happen because people are used to hearing things the same way. But in other churches, they say God from God, light from light, true God from true God. I think that's a little bit more accurate. Because Jesus possesses his deity not independently, not autonomously. But he possesses it from the Father. So his deity is from his Father. And that's what those phrases mean, God of God and light of light. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***