Doctrine of Christ

Jesus Christ is the eternal, beloved Son of the Father, who shares all things with Him in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Athanasius, in his treatise Against the Arians, quotes the Presbyter Arius’ book Thalia saying that “God was not always Father. He was God alone and solitary, before He was the Father, and afterwards He became a Father.”

 The implications of such a conception are staggering and multi-dimensional. In 325 AD the Council of Nicaea was convened to address this question directly, and concluded that the relationship of the Father and the Son is not created but divine and eternal. Jesus Christ is not a creature, but “Light from Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of the same being as the Father” (homoousios to Patri). This critical phrase is enshrined in the heart of the Nicene Creed. For Athanasius there was never a time  hen the Father was without His Son and Spirit, existing alone as an abstract, nonrelational, single-person deity, simply god and not Father. As he stated bluntly: “The Holy Trinity is no created being.”

 And as Hilary of Poitiers declared:   

I call to mind that the very centre of a saving faith is the belief not merely in God, but in God as Father; not merely in Christ, but in Christ as the Son of God; in Him, not as a creature, but as God the Creator, born of God.

Here we stand before the beautiful mystery of the very being of God. Three divine persons completely dwelling in one another in indivisible oneness without loss of distinct personhood—perichoresis. There is no dimension of divine being deeper than or beyond or before the communion of the blessed Three, who live forever in indivisible oneness and love. This relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit is not new, not a mere form that the hidden and unknowable God assumed during the incarnation; it did not begin on Christmas morning. This is who God is and always has been and always will be. And this divine  relationship forms the womb of creation.

- Baxter Kruger