SUNDAY
May 21, 2006
vol. 17, no. 128

"He was by nature God"

Philippians 2: 6


    It is only natural to realize Christ was the Son of God - the Second Person of the Triune Divinity with two natures - divine and human. It is only natural, and yet it is the unnatural which so many have been duped by from the first century right up through today; especially today. But just as Christ foretold, all these things must come to pass - including the anathemas - for the son of perdition to reveal himself as the Antichrist and then be cast forever into the netherworld of the total absence of God, while those who are baptized and believe all the truths Christ teaches through His Mystical Bride will forever benefit from the eternal sacrifice offered by the God-man.

"In our time Arians abound, deniers of Christ's divinity. The movie, The Da Vinci Code, asserts that Jesus was merely a man and was not declared to be divine until the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. But Jesus Christ declared His Own divinity when He took to Himself the name God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai - "I AM". "Amen, amen," He said to His adversaries: "I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM" (Jn.8:58). The very reason for His crucifixion was His claim to divinity, for which He was accused of blasphemy by the Pharisees: "They therefore took up stones to cast at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out from the temple" (John 8:59)."

      Editor's Note: In Father Louis Campbell's sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter, he tackles the very essence of what Catholics believe and wherein all the controversy has arisen from the gnostics of the first century to the agnostics of the twenty-first century. Despite the twisted fiction of The Da Vinci Code and the even more twisted fiction of Catholic truth by the false church of Vatican II, true Catholic Truth is clearly delineated in the Gospels and Sacred Scriptures with prophesies of the Old Testament fulfilled in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, One Person with two natures - human and divine. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity - the God-man was a man like all others except He could not sin. That debunks any rubbish that Christ physically begot a child in the fictitious Merevingian Line. It is all fable, and yet, even in fable, it is vital to express the truth for there are many fools who will believe the lies the evil one fabricates. They who believe the lies and blasphemies are cooperators with the Antichrist. Father explains in his sermon [bold and italics below are editor's emphasis.]


    "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God" (John 1:1). With these words St. John, Evangelist and Apostle, begins the Fourth Gospel. In his first epistle he states: "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. And everyone who loves Him Who begot, loves also the One begotten of Him" (1 John 5:1). "Who is the liar," he says, "but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is the Antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. No one who disowns the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also" (1 John 2:22,23).

    How fortunate were the first disciples to gaze upon the Son of God, Jesus Christ, with their own eyes, and to believe that He came forth from God! How fortunate are those who believe as they did - that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, born to be our Savior, Who after He had suffered and died for us, rose again from the dead and ascended to the Father!

    "No one who disowns the Son has the Father" (1 John 2:23). So it goes with the world. In denying the Son, they have denied the Father also, and do not have the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit. The result is confusion and chaos. Without the truth they can find no satisfactory answers, and life has lost its meaning. Despair is the result. There are many suicides. Often they take the lives of others before taking their own lives. Some kill themselves by degrees through drugs and alcohol. Hundreds of millions enter this world only to starve to death or die of aids and other diseases. We are haunted by wars and threatening disasters.

    "He who confesses the Son has the Father also" (1 John 2:23). During the early years of the fourth century there arose Arianism, the first of the great heresies. In the year of Our Lord 319, Arians could be heard singing the refrain which denied the divinity of the Son and almost destroyed orthodox Catholicism: "There was a time when the Son was not." In order to put an end to the terrible controversy that developed, the Emperor Constantine called together the Council of Nicea in the year 325, at which it was defined that the Son is "one in substance (homoousion, consubstantialem) with the Father." The Council of Chalcedon in 451 dealt the decisive blow to the Arian heresy, defining that Jesus Christ is a Divine Person having two natures, human and divine. These two natures are united in such a way that they remain distinct in the one Person of the Son. This is called the "hypostatic union." Jesus Christ is therefore one of us, "like us in all things but sin" (Hebrews 4:15), but His divine nature is the same as that of the Father.

    In our time Arians abound, deniers of Christ's divinity. The movie, The Da Vinci Code, asserts that Jesus was merely a man and was not declared to be divine until the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. But Jesus Christ declared His Own divinity when He took to Himself the name God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai - "I AM". "Amen, amen," He said to His adversaries: "I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM" (John 8:58). The very reason for His crucifixion was His claim to divinity, for which He was accused of blasphemy by the Pharisees: "They therefore took up stones to cast at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out from the temple" (John 8:59).

    Already a mere thirty years after Our Lord's crucifixion, in the year 63 A.D., St. Paul refers to a hymn of the Christians at that time which testifies to Christ's divinity: "Have this in mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Who though He was by nature God, did not consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied Himself, taking the nature of a slave and being made like unto men. And appearing in the form of men, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient to death, even to death on a cross" (Philippians 2:5-8).

    Everything, the whole economy of salvation, depends upon the man Jesus Christ being truly God. If Jesus is not God we are not redeemed, we are all on our way to Hell. Pope St. Leo the Great explains in one of his letters:

    "The divine nature and the nature of a servant were to be united in one person so that the Creator of time might be born in time, and He through Whom all things were made might be brought forth in their midst. For unless the new man, by being made in the likeness of sinful flesh, had taken on Himself the nature of our first parents, unless He had stooped to be one in substance with His mother while sharing the Father's substance and, being alone free from sin, united our nature to His, the whole human race would still be held captive under the dominion of Satan."

    In discussing the question of man's participation in the Divine Nature by grace, St. Augustine remarked: "God became man that man might become God." In his Confessions he speaks of the key point in his conversion: "I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, Who is also God, supreme over all things and blessed for ever."

    To this day we pray the Nicene Creed in the Traditional Latin Mass: "(I believe) …in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God. Born of the Father before all ages. God of God; Light of Light; true God of true God. Begotten not made; of one being with the Father; by Whom all things were made…"

    No mere man could be "the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world," atoning to God the Father for the sins of men, but a MAN WHO IS GOD can bridge the gap between earth and Heaven, between Humanity and Divinity. And the Son of Man, Jesus Christ is that MAN. In the words of St. Paul:

    "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For in Him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and invisible… All things have been created through and unto Him, and He is before all creatures, and in Him all things hold together… For it has pleased God the Father that in Him all His fullness should dwell, and that through Him He should reconcile to Himself all things, whether on the earth or in the heavens, making peace through the blood of His cross" (Colossians 1:15, 16a, 17, 19, 20).

Father Louis J. Campbell


    SUNDAY
    May 21, 2006
    vol 17, no. 128
    "Qui legit, intelligat"
    Father Louis Campbell's Sunday Sermons