‘Tis Mystery All

by Frances Young.

On April 26^th 2025 a group of us were standing in the spring sunshine by a lake shore, peering over the wall at the sunken remains of an ancient basilica. It was quite recently, they said, that someone in a light aircraft had spotted something hidden under the water – now it was an archaeological dig. Further along the shore there was a children’s playground – Iznik was a bit of a resort. Back in 325 CE it was a resort known as Nicaea, a retreat for the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and here he assembled the bishops, demanding that they unify the Church to unite the Empire.

We were an ecumenical group of roughly a dozen invited by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople-New Rome to commemorate that 1st Nicene Council held seventeen centuries ago, and they were almost certainly assembled in that sunken basilica below us. The Chair of our symposium read in the original Greek the creed they then agreed, affirming that the Son/Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ was “of one being with Father” (homoousios tōi Patri).

This was the third day of our meeting “with field trips.” We had been at the Patriarchate’s conference centre in Istanbul reading papers to each other, discussing the impact of the Council, its creed and canons, visiting key Christian sites in the city. Now our final session was held in Nicaea itself, with papers from three Orthodox scholars; earlier sessions had contributions from Western Christian traditions, Roman Catholic, Anglican and various Protestants. Our concerns had ranged from ecumenical politics to theology, but the spirit was a common respect for the essentially scriptural truth promulgated then and upheld throughout all the major splits, between Byzantines and Orientals, between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics, and indeed through the Reformation and the Evangelical Revival: the Son of God is fully God in every sense of the Word, not some semi-divine or angelic subordinate.

This remarkable seventeenth centenary has kept me busy over recent months, with requests for articles, lectures and indeed a paper for the symposium in Istanbul. It has provoked deepening reflection on the amazing consequence that we can read off the character of God from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – for being homoousios with the Father means he was – yes, truly human – but also one who was God in every sense of the term, one who out of sheer love chose to “empty” the divine self (Phil. 2.7) so as to be able to experience the constraints of our creaturely life, our suffering, even our death. It is an utter paradox, something that explodes our categories: “the immortal dies,” sings Charles Wesley, “’tis mystery all.”

And that not only demands a certain intellectual humility, but also challenges our culture. We tend to assume that a mystery is something to be solved, as in a detective-story, something to be explained away – that recourse to a claim to mystery is a cop-out. It is interesting that the neuroscientist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, has challenged this in his wide-ranging discussion of the short-comings of Western culture, The Matter with Things (2 vols, subtitled, “Our Brians, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”, published in 2021 by Perspectiva Press, London):

Mystery does not imply muddled thinking. On the other hand thinking you can be clear about something which in its nature is essentially mysterious is muddled thinking. Nor does mystery betoken a lack of meaning – rather a superabundance of meaning in relation to our normal finite vision. (p. 1258)

So what about the resurrection? To take away the mystery and claim that Jesus “literally” or “as a historical fact” rose from the dead is to diminish it – like the novel which told how Jesus came round in the cool cave, managed to get out, married Mary Magdalene and lived happily ever after in Egypt. That kind of resuscitation would mean he would have to die again, and it’s not what we mean by resurrection, is it? “’Tis mystery all” because the eternal has broken into the time-space universe, because an event has occurred beyond historical investigation or proof, and new life utterly beyond death enables Christ’s presence, presence everywhere and anywhere, like the omni-presence of God.

Is it any wonder, then, that in the Gospel of John (10.30) Jesus is presented as affirming “I and the Father are one,” that the bishops at Nicaea concluded that the Son of God is “of one being with the Father,” and Charles Wesley sang of “Our God contracted to a span/incomprehensibly made man”?