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bible study
"Bible in hand"

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Bible Study takes place once a month on Thursdays from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

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Below is a summary of each session.

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The churches of the Reformation are characterized by their privileged link with the biblical text which they consider as the foundation of their convictions and their practices.

Tools to go further and prepare for the session

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The Bible online:www.levangil.com

Confessions of Faith:https://www.ressourceschretiennes.com

The history of the Apostles' Creed

 

The theme for the 2022-2023 season is

 

THE CONFESSION OF FAITH

 

Starting from the Church's first confession of faith, the Apostles' Creed, it is a question of discovering together what it means to "confess one's faith" and what do we say when we confess our faith?

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Through the study of several confessions, ancient or contemporary, we seek how to express the faith today, for ourselves and our contemporaries.

  • September 22: introduction

During the introductory session, documentation was distributed 1 . It contains elements to understand the history of the Apostles' Creed compared to the Nicene-Constantinople Creed of 325-381.

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It is recalled that the word symbol comes from the Greek verb simbalein 'σγμβάλλειν), to throw or put together. It originally designates an object cut in half of which two people each kept half so as to be able to recognize themselves in a crowd.

 

Its use was widespread in the first Christian communities to authorize entry into the assembly. A contemporary example of this use of the symbol is the traditional cut-off cinema ticket. It designates a collection or a summary: what is “put together”. A symbol of the faith is therefore a summary of the main truths of the faith which makes it possible to recognize each other among believers of the same faith.

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In the Bible, the word "confession" most often translates the Greek verb homologeo (ὁμολογέω) which gave in French the verb "to homologate" and all its semantic universe: conform certification, things that are homologous are identical, etc. ..

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A confession of faith therefore has the primary function of allowing followers of the same confession to recognize each other and at the same time to distinguish themselves from those who do not share the same confession. It is therefore a double movement of reunion and separation.

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The program for the year will seek to study how this notion of "confession" has developed over time in the New Testament and in the history of the Church, as well as to question the relevance of the Apostles' Creeds for our time and therefore to propose a confession of faith for today in the ecumenical context of our group.

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1 The story of the symbols of the Apostles and of Nicaea-Constantinople, told and commented on by a layman. Lecture at the French Reformed Church in Zurich, January 28 and 30, 2014 by Mr. Max Lionel Hefti –https://www.erfz.ch/content/e7/e1412/e2069/BrochureSymbolesDesApotres.pdf

  • October 20

From the reading of the following texts:

Mark 2, 1-12, (the account of the paralytic); Mark 5, 24-34 (the woman with an issue of blood) and Luke 7, 2-10 (the centurion), which have in common to illustrate the expression "your faith has saved you" (Mark 5 , 34), faith manifests itself in the context of healings. It is not a set of convictions that could be expressed in a series of articles “  of faith” but of a “trust in”.

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To "believe" is to have confidence in the ability to act of the one invoked. The action that is hoped for here is of the order of forgiveness and healing. Forgiveness and healing being in this context almost synonymous, illness being understood at the time of Christ as being the result/punishment of sin: to be forgiven then means to be cured.

 

Faith here is not a question of content but of a confident attitude: that of the friends of the paralytic, of the woman and of the Roman soldier.

  • 1st December

I believe in God, the almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth.

 

The confession of faith aims to say who God is, what he is and what is his relationship with the world, defined as his creation. In the same movement, the confession of faith says who man is, defined as a creature. Any confession of faith corresponds to a theology, a knowledge of God, and at the same time to an anthropology, a knowledge of man.

 

And this by virtue of the fundamental Calvinist principle which is that the knowledge of God and of man are joint things: "Almost the whole sum of our wisdom, which, on the whole, deserves to be reputed true and entire wisdom, is situated in two parts: it is that by knowing God, each of us also knows himself. Moreover, although they are united to each other by many bonds, it is not easy to discern which goes before and produces the other.

 

A conjunction supported by the concepts of the first sentence of the Symbol

 

  • “I believe”: it is always a person who expresses himself, a characterized and individualized individual even if he is part of a community of believers (who are by definition “homologous”, cf. October 20)

 

  • in God: but not in any divine power, transcendence, first principle or great watchmaker, he who is

 

  • Father: (read John 17, 1-5) he is immediately qualified in relation to his son, we can only know God through the Son who is his revelation, but he is also Father in relation to humans. It is a way of qualifying his relationship with humanity and more particularly with each of those who say “I believe”: read Mt 6, 10-15. To say that God is "father" is to understand him as "compassionate and benevolent" in the manner of Psalm 103 (especially verses 11 to 18).

 

  • almighty: that is to say that he has no limitation, nothing that would limit his ability to act, to want: Attention in the ancient context, all cultures have an "almighty" god but their “competence” is generally limited, threatened, thus in the Greco-Latin religion, Ouranos is supplanted by Chronos, who is defeated by Zeus, the relations of the Greco-Latin gods between them are relations of filiation.

 

  • creator of heaven and earth: heaven and earth are united, this is the whole of reality. Nicaea will say that the visible and the invisible are created. Nothing is beyond God's power and his being “creator” means that his creation is “separate” from him. One cannot confuse creation, nature but also the whole of reality, with God. Creation is never at best more than a “mirror” of God's glory. For Calvin, it is the “theater of the glory of God”, the space where the glory of God gives itself to be seen. This is the analogy: the scene should not be confused with the actor. In biblical theology (read Genesis 1 or Psalm 103), creation is not God and there is no "natural theology", that is to say knowledge of God that would be possible through effort of the human spirit, an understanding of God by means of reason. For Israel, knowledge of God passes through the Law given to Moses, for the Church, it passes through Christ.

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Read Romans 5, 1-5

Justice and peace are graciously given through faith and manifest in charity, it is the work of Christ.

Justice and peace are no longer given by means of the observance of the Law, ie. sacrificial, liturgical rituals or pious works.

Christians, taking up the Jewish formulation of an almighty Father God, creator of heaven and earth, transform its meaning by conditioning this knowledge of God as being both good and almighty to the knowledge of Christ: it it is in Jesus Christ alone that God is no longer a God of anger but of goodness.

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1 Jean Calvin, Institution of the Christian religion, I, 1, text established and modernized by Jean Cadier, Calvinist Society of France, Labor et Fides, 1955 (1560).

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