September 15, 2021 Show with Dr. Tony Costa on “Early Christian Creeds & Hymns”

Early Christian Creeds as Apologetic Witness

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet Earth, listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 15th day of September 2021.

And I'm always thrilled to have a returning guest on my program by the name of Dr. Tony Costa, who has become a very dear friend of mine, one of my favorite guests on this program, one of my favorite speakers at conferences that I personally arrange, and he has been also a speaker at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon in the past and has participated in a debate that I arranged with Roman Catholic apologist Robert St. Genes a few years ago.

He is professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary and today we are going to be addressing his new book, Early Christian Creeds and Hymns, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Tony Costa.

Well, it's always a pleasure to be with you, Chris, and thank you for having me on.

It's a joy, brother, and why don't you tell our listeners something about Toronto Baptist Seminary.

Toronto Baptist Seminary is a reformed, began in the 1930s, Dr. T .T. Shields, who was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, also in Toronto, and it is a seminary that is dedicated to the doctrines of grace, and we train men and women, train men and women for the mission field, and we also train men for the ministry, for the pastorate, and also we equip both men and women who want to go into doctoral studies and pursue PhDs and PhDs as well.

And that website, if you want more information, is tbs .edu, tbs, for Toronto Baptist Seminary, dot edu. Well, I must say that this book that you have written is basically something that one might not expect you to write about, not that you would necessarily have ignorance or lack of knowledge in any way, shape, or form on early Christian creeds and hymns, but it seems to be somewhat of a different subject that people who are familiar with the name Dr. Tony Costa, they immediately think of apologetics, they immediately think of your debates with Muslims and Roman Catholics and others, they usually are thinking about things that tend to be more controversial, your refutations of Marxism, and your warnings to the body of Christ about how Marxism is not only seeping into the secular realm of politics and other realms that have great importance in the lives of those living both in Canada and the United States, but also how it is negatively affecting the Church, perhaps through ignorance and naivete on the part of those who are allowing this heinous and satanic ideology to enter in somehow through the back door of the Church.

So, to hear that you have written a book about early Christian creeds and hymns is somewhat fascinating, and in fact, am I mistaken to say, if my memory serves me right, wasn't this the theme of your doctoral dissertation?

No, my doctoral dissertation is called Calling Letters, which I've been wanting to do for quite a while, and it is rooted in apologetics because of the text itself and the hymns. A lot of the New Testament text itself has also hymns that are embedded.

There are certain grammatical features in the creedal or hymnic material, and the reason why I wrote this book, Chris, was for apologetic purposes. What I do with these creeds and hymns is I demonstrate that from the earliest creeds, 1 Corinthians 15, it's in there that affirms the deity of Christ.

For example, in my book, I go into great detail about how the word Lord there is used for the divine name Yahweh in the Old and the New. ...credential doctrines like the deity of Christ, Jesus died on the cross, that claim is absolutely false.

And also, the deity of Christ, ...against not just Islam but cults that deny the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, and also rabbinic Judaism that is to be distinguished from biblical Judaism. ...provide an affirming of our beliefs.

So, hymns have creed-like characteristics, and so they both dovetail with each other. I do mention the Nicene Creed in the New Testament, and I also dip back into the Old Testament.

Creed, Confession, and the Apostolic Witness

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And we do have a question already from R .J. in White Plains, New York. And he asks, What is the difference between a creed and a confession of faith? That's a very interesting question, and I have heard, I don't know if this fits your definition, Tony, but I have heard from some scholars and historians that there is no difference.

And then I've heard from others that a creed is intended to be more brief, so that more of those who profess to believe in Christ, a greater number, can unite around it, because of the fact that it will contain main points on certain issues and not go into too much detail exhaustively.

For instance, I don't even think that the Gospel is contained in the Apostles' Creed, but the nature of Christ and so on and the Trinity are discussed or professed, declared in that creed. And yet, on the other end of the spectrum, I have heard that the intention of a confession of faith throughout history has typically been to be more detailed in order to set a certain group of Christians apart from the rest, like the Westminster Confession of Faith or the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith or the Savoy Declaration or the Three Forms of Unity or the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, although that latter one is a very brief document comparatively.

But it's to show the distinction of whoever happens to hold to that confession, like the Presbyterians or the Congregationalists or the Reformed Baptists or the Anglicans. Does what I said hold water with you, or do you have your own definitions?

Well, I think what intrigues Church and the... So, for example, the London Baptist Confession of Faith, well, there's a first and a second. Most Reformed Baptists follow the second. And, of course, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Augsburg Confession and so forth, the Belgic Confession, all of these confessions developed over Church history, over the period of Church history.

And they were basically meant to articulate which denominations stood out. In the New Testament text study, Changeable, Romans 10 .9, it says, If you shall confess with your mouth the word, which means to say the same thing, the hapi is basically a little, in Romans 10 .9, Paul, the name of the Lord, of Church administration and so forth.

But in the early Christian period, the early Church period, the New Testament period, the Apostolic period, the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, they're much the creeds you find in the New Testament.

So, in the New Testament, verse 4, verse 18, the Proverbs that you hear a lot of theologians and Church historians make today, as far as the New Testament goes, and the Confession and the Creed, those words go hand-in-hand, because when Christians were baptized, what they would do is that he is sanctioned, that we see later in Church history.

Now, I want to clarify something that I said earlier about the Apostles' Creed not containing the Gospel. It does, of course, contain the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, but how the benefits of that apply to the sinner are not contained, or is not contained in there, and therefore you have Roman Catholics and Reformed evangelical Protestants embracing this same creed, and yet they have a different Gospel.

Right. Right. The creeds are something like mere Christianity. The fundamentals, alone, on the basis of Christ alone, and so forth and so on, they don't go into those areas. And so, on the fundamentals, and that is why, as you write in Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, Anglican churches, and so forth, they can recite the Apostles' Creed in their worship, and still, to the Gospel.

Now, when you have titled your book, Early Christian Creeds, what do you mean by early? How far back are we going here?

Yeah, we're talking first century. We're talking, and so we're looking at in the New Testament.

And why don't you open up some of those for us?

Yeah, so, to begin with, what I do in my book, Chris, is I define the word creed, which means, I believe, and that is seen in Creed and so forth. That is why these creeds always begin with the words, I believe.

I believe in Abraham, and so forth, and so on. What I do in my book, Chris, is I begin by first in Singing Hymns, Testaments 26, 5 -9, where we're to make a creed, which would recite, Jacob, and then, became a mighty nation, and then God delivered them with a mighty hand, and redeemed them with signs and wonders.

And so, from God, show that God is not just the Redeemer, like the song of Miriam, the people that sing in the tested tongue during the Jewish Messianic community before the Old Testament. Paul talks about singing hymns to the Lord in spiritual songs, revamps that Shema.

What he does there, Chris, is he takes the Shema, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, what he does is, what he does is he, what I say here is that Paul, and Larry Hurtado, the late Larry Hurtado, wrote in his very own, is he's including Jesus into the divine identity of God.

What he does there, the identity of God himself, a Unitarian, Unitarian solitary person within the Godhead. We have a continuity to the succession with the group that just, they defend and proclaim.

The Shema, Yahweh, and the Divine Identity of Christ

And in fact, we're going to be going to our first break right now, so if you want to pick up where we left off when we return, if anybody, again, has any questions of your own that you'd like to ask, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail dot com.

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Don't go away, we'll be right back with Tony Kassada.

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Go to ignitedbytheword .org ignitedbytheword .org. If you just tuned us in we are having a fascinating discussion with my dear brother in Christ and friend Dr. Tony Costa Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

We are discussing early Christian creeds and hymns and if you have a question.

Send it to.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Before I go to any listener question I want to ask you something about the schma that you were addressing before the break.

Yes sir.

Anybody who has had any ongoing.

Familiarity.

Exposure or friendship with either Orthodox Jewish people or with Messianic Jews. Christians who are Jews they have no doubt heard the schma recited and in fact even just in the worship.

Of.

Orthodox believing Christians I don't mean Eastern Orthodox here but Biblically sound Christians that will come up as well obviously.

But.

One might be jolted back a bit when they hear our mutual friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries declare or cite the schma because unlike the way it is normally read or proclaimed using Adonai.

He.

Uses the name of Yahweh and I've even heard people say to me, you know I just heard Dr. White misquote the schma he said Yahweh but Dr. White believes that's the way that the original Jews of the Old Covenant would have said that and it was only when the rabbinic tradition later developed focusing on Talmudic laws and so forth that the Jews out of fear of taking the Lord's name in vain no longer use the name of Yahweh.

Am I making sense here? Am I in the right base here? What is your response to that?

Yeah, the name Yahweh does appear in the schma the name Yahweh schma, Yahweh Yahweh Adonai Eloheinu Yahweh, they included the word Adonai as you rightly name, the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death, the name of the Lord shall be put to death so that the idea that Jews began to avoid using the name and substituted it with Adonai there seems to be good evidence already in the time of Jesus and the reason we know that is because they avoided using the name for the Lord and there are some theories as to why that happened.

Some think it happened during the Babylonian captivity when the Jews were in captivity, they would not utter the name of God so that the Babylonians and their antagonists would not assume it. You will notice that in the Aramaic parts of Daniel Daniel does not use the divine name, he refers to Maranatha.

Mara means the Lord in Aramaic and in the Babylonian captivity, the Jewish leaders became very about uttering the divine name publicly for fear that it might be profaned by the Gentiles. And so he is absolutely correct with the unorthodox name because one of the things that the Mishnah says is the Mishnah says, are those who if I'm dealing with an unorthodox accommodation as Paul says, I become all things to all men to the Jews I become as a Jew when I'm sharing the gospel with a Jewish person and I know they are very movement.

I will Adonai or another word they use is Hashem. Hashem means the name but if it's a reformed Jew, most reformed Jews to the utterance of the divine name say that yeah, Dr. White is absolutely right.

That's what it says in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament there are some Greek speaking Jews the name of Theodosian, we've got another guy by the name of Aquila, and then another guy by the name of Symechus and in their translations of the Greek Old Testament some of them did try to pronounce the divine name in Greek letters and others tried the divine name by placing it in the Greek text.

There are some examples of manuscripts with the divine name in there, but the overwhelming copies of the Septuagint show us that pronouncing the name, and that is why today in our English Bibles you will notice that the divine name Lord with a capital D the Roman Christian Bible tried to bring back the divine name Yahweh, the Roman Catholic translation the Jerusalem Bible uses Yahweh throughout and of course the American Standard Version of 1901 and just out of curiosity.

Since there is debate and controversy over the Septuagint especially between Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants.

It seems that.

The earliest copies of the Septuagint that we are aware of contain the apocryphal books, or as the Roman Catholics prefer to call it, the Deuterocanonical books. But how far do these copies go back, because I have been told that they contain those books because they don't go back far enough.

That's a common misunderstanding, Chris. The copies of the Septuagint that we have, 6 Thaniaticus which is 325 AD did not have the apocryphal. Roger T. Beckwith in his book The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament, shows great detail on this.

He's a canon and I think Michael Kruger has written on this as well. But the main proof we have, Chris, that the Septuagint originally did not have the apocryphal, is that if we look at Philo of Alexandria he's contemporaneous with Jupiter in Alexandria Egypt, he quotes he uses the Septuagint he quotes from the Greek translation and never once none of the books of the apocryphal.

The canon of the Greek Old Testament that Philo of Alexandria had and knew, is the Torah, the Law, the Prophets and the writings that we have in our Bibles. And so, never once quotes from any of the books of the apocryphal.

There's a sure proof that he did not have a translation of his Old Testament history. They were insisting that those were written in Hebrew, because they knew it was not in the Hebrew canon and those who accept it did not know Hebrew, he did not know Greek.

Very little Greek. Gostin was more of a philosopher, but he was not. He was not a linguist. The Septuagint of the time of Neadicut is a Christian.

He wants to view, or listen to a really great debate that I orchestrated a number of years ago between Dr. James R. White the mutual friend of Dr. Tony Costa and mine Dr. White and Roman Catholic Apologist Gary Machuta on the Apocrypha, or the Deuterocanonical Books.

I go to AOMIN .org. AOMIN .org which is the website of Alpha Omega Ministries, and if you type in a search engine, Machuta M-I-C-H-U-T-A you will find that debates, or you could go to YouTube and type in James White vs. Gary Machuta, I believe it's the only debate that they had with each other.

In fact, perhaps Dr. Costa has also debated on this, I don't know. Have you also debated on the Apocrypha?

Not on the Apocrypha, but it is on the horizon, I do have a couple of Roman Catholic Apologists that want to debate me on some various topics, so that might be one of them that we will debate on.

Great, and we have one of our loyal, faithful listeners, and financial supporters of Iron Trepans Iron Radio has sent in a question Grady from Asheboro, North Carolina. Greetings brothers, when I think of hymns in the Holy Scriptures, I always think of the Psalms.

How many other hymns are there in the Bible and how many did Dr. Costa write about?

Yeah, good question. The Psalms are definitely the hymnbook of God's people in the Old Testament, and we still use them today some of the Reformed some of the old Reformed churches only use the Psalms and some of them will not use any of the hymns, even the classical hymns that we use in our churches, they believe that only the Psalms are meant for the worship of God in terms of singing.

And Calvin himself wrote in his institute that the hymns were given to the people of God to use or worship in the gathering of the Jew. In my book is I deal with Christian hymns, and so I'm focused primarily on the New Testament, so some of the hymns that I deal with and spiritual in my 11th chapter I deal with hymns that were sung both to the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father but they also sang hymns to the risen Christ, which again as I said earlier, reinforces the deity.

Now here's some of them in the New Testament. The most famous of them is the Carmen Christi. And Carmen Christi is simply the Latin word for the hymn of Christ, the song of Christ. And that's found in Philippians 2 section there, that beautiful Christ being in the form of God and how he took on the form of a servant and became a human being and how he suffered and then he was highly exalted and every knee will bow.

And that is a beautiful song that we have in the New Testament. Another one is what I call the Great Confession. We have another hymn there. He was manifest in the flesh, he was king of angels and so forth, and that is another hymn.

Another hymn I mentioned is found in Ephesians 5 14, where in that passage the Apostle Paul in that beautiful hymn says, Wake up, and Christ will shine on you. So this is an evangelistic hymn, called upon Christ might shine upon you.

I also deal with what I call the hymn of the Suffering Messiah in 1 Peter, how Christ there bore our sins in his own body and by his stripes we have been healed. Another hymn I address as well is Hebrews 1 we have in the New Testament, down in John 1 1 -18.

And what I do in my book is I end with what I call 15 -20. Now you're probably wondering, how do we know these are hymns? Because I mean, after all, we don't have the music notes to any of these hymns in the New Testament.

Well, the way we can tell that these are hymns, there are certain grammatical features that indicate to the reader hymnic material. And so into great detail about what these indicators are, but most hymns tend to have grammar that is very different from the rest of them.

So you'll notice in some of these hymns, like Philippians 2 -6, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. 1 Timothy 3 -16, who was made he, who was manifest in the flesh.

Hebrews 1 -2 and 3 who being the image of his the brightness of his image, of his nature and so forth and so on. So there are certain indicators, grammatical indicators, and these are very obvious in the Greek text.

The New Testament Hymns That Proclaim Christ

In fact, we have to go.

To our midway break so you can pick up where you left off there. We ask of your patience the midway break is longer than the other breaks because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because the FCC requires Grace Life to localize geographically this program to Lake City, Florida and so therefore, while they air their local announcements, we air our globally heard commercials.

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At.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages.

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