Written by O. Palmer Robertson |
Thursday, February 8, 2024
What’s wrong with this perspective on human life? People everywhere in America agree that a bad attitude in life brings bad results. But the biblical perspective strikes deeper into the fallen nature of humanity. Bad attitude embodies sin – sin against God the Creator, and Christ the Redeemer. The movie also communicates the idea that doing good things with a good attitude will bring good results. But no example by a fallen human being has the power to transform even one person to have a purified heart. Nothing short of the miraculous, creative work of God’s Holy Spirit has the capacity to change the nature of a single soul. 

A marathon. All day long, every two and a half hours. The same old movie about Groundhog Day, which is celebrated in the USA every February 2. If the groundhog comes out of his hole and sees his shadow, this greatest of all prognosticators will have predicted six more weeks of winter.
If a major television network can run the same movie for over 12 hours straight, the message of this movie must capture the heartbeat of a major portion the American people. But what is the message? What is it in this movie that defines a heartbeat of American culture today?
The formula is very simple. Have a negative attitude toward all of life, and everything will go bad for you. Change your attitude and your actions to a positive perspective on all of life, and you will be a person filled with happiness and joy. You will live “happily ever after.”
A simple formula. Everyone can understand it immediately. Change your attitude and your accompanying actions, and you can have a happy, happy life.
So how does the formula play out? Despise your work, despise people, despise even God’s little creatures like a groundhog, and you will be miserable. Bill Murray, the lead actor, has been cast perfectly for this role. While looking miserable, he ignores a poor old street beggar. He scorns an old high school friend. He rudely turns down a nice lady’s offer of the best coffee she can produce. He mocks a small-town community’s joyful celebration.
But these bad attitudes foster grosser actions. He deceives an unsuspecting young woman by lying about their previous fictitious high school years together. He lures her into sexual immorality. He schemes and commits a bank robbery. He steals an automobile and leads small town police through a life-threatening high-speed chase.
In terms of openly and convincingly demonstrating that “out of the heart proceed the issues of life,” the movie does an excellent job. Bad attitude invariably leads to immoral conduct. Unintentionally the truth comes out. A bad heart leads to a miserable life. It even gets so bad that the main character makes many efforts to take his own life. He drives an automobile over a cliff, with the car landing upside down and bursting into a consuming ball of fire. He steps directly into the path of a moving truck. He leaps from the top of the highest building in town. He electrocutes himself in the bathtub. But he cannot succeed in destroying his life. Every morning he wakes up again on February 2nd.
Inadvertently the truth comes out once more, though in distorted form. Question 19 from the child’s catechism simply but profoundly asks: “Do you have a soul as well as a body?” Answer: “Yes, I have a soul that can never die.” You cannot kill your soul, no matter how hard you try.
The second half of the movie tells a different tale. What is this tale?
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Never has there been any point in God’s eternal existence when the Son was not begotten by the Father. If there had been, then the relation of Father and Son would be merely temporal and there would be no way of maintaining a singularity in the divine essence while affirming a real plurality of persons. Without generation as an eternal operation of God, tritheism or modalism are the only alternatives. This truth of eternal generation helps in the interpretation of certain passages of Scripture. For example, no doctrine gives greater aid in understanding John 5:26 than this. “For as the Father hath life in himself; so he hath given to the Son to have life in himself” (KJV). 

This article is part 12 in a series by Tom Nettles on Remembering Jesus Christ. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11).

The first of the ecumenical creeds was formulated in a council called by the emperor Constantine. According to historians Eusebius of Caesarea and Lanctantius, Constantine was converted to Christianity as he prepared for a battle with Maxentius in the year 312. His victory, which he attributed to Christ, made him the sole ruler of the western portion of the Empire. After a dozen years of gaining more knowledge of the church’s organization and doctrines, Constantine, aware of a theological controversy that stirred the church, made arrangements for church bishops to meet in Nicea (present day Iznik in Turkey) to settle the dispute. Around 300 bishops were able to come with only half a handful of representatives from the west.
The controversy that prompted the call to Nicea focused on the teaching of a presbyter of Alexandria Egypt named Arius (260-336). Arius strongly concluded that the monotheism necessary to Christianity eliminated the possibility of any other personal entity sharing the status of absolute deity. In a letter to his friend Eusebius of Nicomedia in 318 during the initial tensions of the controversy, he complained that Alexander “greatly injures and persecutes us . . . since we do not agree with him when he says publicly, ‘Always Father, always Son, ‘Father and Son together,’ . . . ‘Neither in thought nor by a single instant is God before the Son.’” Arius instead taught that “before he was begotten or created or ordained or founded, he was not.” He, that is, the one called the son, is not “a part of the unbegotten in any way” but was “constituted” by God’s “will and counsel, before times and before ages.”[1]
Arius’s affirmation, therefore, of the lordship of Christ could not mean that he was co-eternal with the Father and of the same nature. The phrases anathematized at the end of the Nicene Creed 325 represent some of the phrases that Arius used to define his understanding of Jesus, the Christ. Because only God is eternal, Jesus is not; and so, “There was when he was not.” Since he is begotten, he must have come into existence subsequent to the Father and, therefore, “begotten” is taken as a synonym for “created.” Since he is created, he cannot be of the same eternal immutable substance as the Father and is, on that account, of a different substance. Since he is a created moral being, even though the first of all created things, he is mutable and could have sinned. The Father, however, endowed him with the power of creation, set him forth to be the redeemer of the fallen race, a task that the Son effected without blemish and thus gained the status of savior. In order to be like us and succeed where we failed, he had to take our flesh. In his person, however, his humanity consisted only of the body while the created logos constituted the rational soul of the person Jesus.
This savior concocted by Arius, therefore, was neither God nor man. The views of Arius show that a single theological principle pressed with a relentless, but false, logic uninformed by other revelatory propositions leads to destructive conclusions.
Among the most important of the biblical theologians opposed to Arius was a young deacon at Alexandria named Athanasius (296-373). Athanasius had written a book entitled On the Incarnation of the Word.[2] In it he had discussed how the incarnation of the Son of God solved an apparent dilemma. God intended to bring his creature man to a state of glorious fellowship with God. He also threatened that if his creature disobeyed then death would be the certain outcome. How can God complete his purpose for man and at the same time keep true to his word? The incarnation is God’s answer to this apparent dilemma. The one who was both God and man could take the death man owed for “all men were due to die,” thus fulfilling the veracity of God’s word and the honor of God. At the same time, he brought to glory the human nature that he shared with the creature, thus fulfilling the divine purpose for man. Athanasius was well-armed in biblical knowledge and in theological reflection for the vital corrective that the Arian speculation demanded.
Though the Council had negative fall-out in church-state relations and the eventual authority of canon law, the most important result of the Council of Nicea was the adoption of the creed. To show the pivotal importance of the substance of this creed we will point to five short insertions. Eusebius of Caesarea (the first church historian) proposed the confession used at baptism by his church (or something very similar) as a possible statement to bring unity to the deeply divided council. When the Arian party agreed to sign the proposed statement, the party led by Alexander of Alexandria (d. 328) and his young deacon Athanasius (296-373) knew that no real unity could be gained by such a tactic. A creed that simply embraced the serious doctrinal disagreements would only perpetuate substantial disharmony and lead to constant dispute. Preeminently, ambiguity about the legitimate object of worship would in fact endorse a principle of idolatry and capitulate to the impression that Scripture itself was not clear in its christological focus. The wisdom of God would be impugned for leaving us without clarity on the status of the one he called “My beloved Son.” What could be more absurd in Christianity that to leave the christological issue a matter of opinion, ambiguity, and diverse formulation?
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As a minister of the gospel, I should have “stayed in my lane,” stuck to the text, and more vehemently opposed any effort to impose a masking requirement upon the people of God. Such a policy and such an application of the Sixth Commandment was not based on the teaching of Scripture, but based on what the government-approved scientists were saying at that time regarding the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis.”

To the beloved congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Oglethorpe:
Three years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my pastoral ministry. At the time, people exhibiting symptoms of a new virus were trickling in to Emergency Rooms in the Chattanooga area. We were told this virus was deadly and dangerous by the media, health experts, and government authorities. I believed them.
These “unprecedented events” would become a great test of the strength of my commitments and my consistency to my guiding principles. It was a test I failed.
I. Worldview
When it was suggested we should suspend the public worship of God for a few weeks I not only agreed to it, but also enabled the suspension of public worship. I was wrong. Although I was motivated by a desire to “do the right thing,” this was undoubtedly the wrong decision and is one the greatest regrets of my life.
This was a worldview failure. A worldview is supposed to help a person make decisions in the absence of all the facts and respond rightly to “unprecedented events.” But I ignored my worldview in March of 2020.
In a Christian Worldview, God is the ultimate reality and the ultimate end (goal) of life is His glory, and a crucial duty of the Christian is to give God the glory He deserves in the context of public worship. But at this time I agreed: the potential for danger was so great, I believed, that even public worship should be shut down.
Although at the time I thought what we were doing was right, in hindsight I see how it reflects a failure to apply my worldview to what I was reading in the news and hearing from other elders both near and far as well as the government authorities. While perhaps there may have been individual situations in which the risk to some people from the new virus was so great their own personal decision to absent themselves from the public worship of God for a season might have been legitimate, it was wrong of me to support suspending God’s public worship for the whole congregation. If the virus was as deadly as we were led to believe, then we needed corporate worship all the more.
I apologize for failing to rightly apply the Scripture to this situation:
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psa. 63:2–4)
II. Wisdom
During the “Quarantine” closure, I began making a series of videos offering mostly half-baked pastoral reflections on the current unpleasantness. Mercifully, few of you watched them. In (at least) one of these videos, I asserted something along the lines of, “…we know masks work…” because there seemed to be no outbreaks tied to all the tourists coming to the Florida theme parks, which at the time required masking. So I encouraged people, as we resumed public worship, to wear a mask in order to prevent the spread of potential sickness.
This was a wisdom failure. As a trained and credentialed minister of the gospel, I do have a bit of expertise in biblical exegesis, theological matters, and ethical questions. But as to whether a piece of cloth can stop a particle of virus, I am wholly unqualified to give advice. But I used the influence of my position as an officer in the Kingdom of God to encourage the people in this congregation to wear masks. And the basis of my exhortation: it [allegedly] works at Disney World. I apologize for deviating from my expertise and training as a pastor to offer pronouncements on a subject about which I knew nothing.
Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent. (Prov. 17:27–28)
III. Ecclesiology
Eventually the hospitals in Chattanooga did get a bit busy with people exhibiting symptoms of the virus that leaked from a communist lab in Wuhan, China. At that time, the Session chose to no longer simply encourage all God’s worshipers to wear masks, but require everyone worshiping or attending functions at the church to wear a mask. While I personally opposed this as a requirement, I dutifully announced it and explained the reasoning behind the policy.
Perhaps some of you may remember, I went so far as to explain – as I preached through the Decalogue – that the Sixth Commandment was the reason the Session required masking: to prevent the potential loss of life. This was inappropriate.
While I personally disagreed that any Church court has the authority to require masking, as I believe this violates both the liberty of conscience and the limits of church power, I nonetheless shared the Session’s embrace of the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis,” and I enabled the Session to transcend what I knew were the limits of its Christ-given authority by reminding people of the policy and urging people to comply with it.
This was a failure of my ecclesiology, my doctrine of the Church.
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