keep this straight in our Christian minds. When we stand up in church and recite the Creed, we often say “that is my faith.” Whereupon someone draws the conclusion that the Christian faith consists in the proper recitation of an ancient formula. The Creed is not your faith—it is an expression of your faith. Your faith is in God, not in any combination of words, however venerable they may be. In a derivative sense you may speak of “the faith once delivered to the saints,” meaning thereby that body of doctrine which expresses the foundation upon which your faith rests. But your faith is always in a Person.
Faith represents an attitude of life. It is far more than verbal assent to any proposition. The good old doctrine of justification by faith does not mean that you win your soul’s salvation by speaking up affirmatively in a loud voice. Your life may belie your words, in which case your statement of faith is vitiated. Justification by faith means that your hope of divine approval is justified by the fact that your life is definitely facing Christ in the path of Christian progress. You may declare it in words, but as Studdert Kennedy once put it, what you actually do is to “bet your life on God.”
I tell you that I have faith in a friend, I believe in him, I trust him. You ask why. I say it is because I know his family. I know something of his training. I am familiar with what he has done, his previous record, his reputation, what he stands for and what other people think of him. All this is the basis of my faith in him.
That is what the Church has done with our Lord Jesus Christ. At the outset the Church proclaimed her faith in Him. Why? Because, said the Church, we know His Heavenly Father, we know how Christ Himself was born into the world, how He lived a sinless life, how He did nothing but good, suffered, and died, and rose again. We know His personal representative, the Holy Spirit, and we have His matchless teachings supported by His peerless character. That is the Church’s creed—the expression of our Christian faith.
Why is a creed necessary? Why must we have doctrine anyhow? May we not swing our lives toward God, fasten our faith on Him, and let it go at that without bothering our heads over formal statements as to what it all means? There are two answers to such questions. In the first place, our minds are an important part of us and we must use them. Because faith means an attitude of life, it covers all the elements of which we are made—will, instinct, feelings, reason. We must not only love God but we must think about Him, and if we are to think intelligently we must organize our thoughts. Christian doctrine is (as we have said before) organized thinking about God.
But the Creeds themselves grow out of the second answer. Very early in Christian history certain persons began to twist the Gospel to suit their own ideas and strayed away from the apostolic tradition. Some of them said that Christ was divine but not really human. Others declared that He was a very fine man but not necessarily divine. Still others took a half-and-half position, selecting only those portions of the Gospel record which happened to fit their particular contentions. In order to protect the integrity of the Gospel the Church found it necessary to state the case in exact terms which could not be misconstrued. For example there was a queer idea propounded that our Lord did not really die—that being divine He could not die, and that the Crucifixion was not an actual event. In repudiation of any such extraordinary garbling of the facts and to clarify its own position, the Church wrote it into the Apostles’ Creed in such plain terms that it could never be misunderstood—He “was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell.” Suppose the Church had been content merely with saying that Christ really was crucified. The distorters might have replied that they fully agreed, but that the Crucifixion did not bring death to Him as we all have to face it. Then anybody could have made it mean anything he liked and the reality of our Saviour’s death would have been held in serious question. So the Church bore down on it, stating it in four ways in order that no one might mix the meaning.
You see, it is not sufficient to say, “I believe in God.” It makes a difference what kind of God you believe in. As the Archbishop of York has well said—“We tend to become like that which we worship.”1 People who worship an indulgent deity, too good-natured ever to reprove them for wrong-doing, are sure to discount sin and become self-satisfied, self-centered, and self-righteous. Those who worship a vague spirit of Goodness soon become spiritually shallow, sentimental, and deficient in the sense of personal responsibility. On the other hand, those who may worship an exacting Judge gradually turn critical themselves, censorious and unsympathetic with the frailties of their neighbors. It can scarcely be otherwise. Cast your best thoughts and aspirations toward an unworthy object and the same unworthy characteristics will be stimulated in your own life. It is far from satisfying when people say they are religious. We want to know what kind of religion they have. Adherents of a bad religion are often excused on the ground that they are very much in earnest. The simple truth is that the more earnest they are for a bad religion, the worse their case becomes.
For this reason the early Christians were in conscience bound to defend Christ against misrepresentation and to protect the very character of God. The whole question of Christian living hung on that issue—because “we tend to become like that which we worship.” Therefore when prospective converts presented themselves for Holy Baptism, they were expected to declare their faith. At first it was sufficient that they should make some such statement as, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”2 Then occasions arose when certain Gospel truths in support of this declaration were misconstrued and the required statement of faith was correspondingly expanded. Thus the Apostles’ Creed began to grow as a baptismal symbol. Nobody ever sat down and composed it out of his own imagination. It was hammered out on the anvil of Christian experience to preserve the fulness of the Christian revelation. The Apostles were the accredited teachers of the Gospel who passed judgment on the authenticity of the instruction given by any other teachers. As they gradually slipped out of the picture by death, it became desirable to have a brief summary of their teaching as a declaration of faith to be used by converts at baptism. Thus early in the second century, just after the apostolic age, simple baptismal creeds began to appear. There was the Creed of Antioch, the Creed of Jerusalem, the old Roman Creed, and others differing slightly in form but all serving the same purpose. They were seldom written down because in those days of persecution it was dangerous to have too many records available to persecutors. Often these simple statements were used by Christians as passwords to identify themselves one to another. Out of these several creeds the Apostles’ Creed finally emerged and was generally accepted.
In the time of Constantine (A.D. 312) Christianity came out into the open and the period of persecution ended. Almost immediately a queer distortion of Christian teaching appeared in Alexandria, in Egypt, under the name of Arianism. It accepted the current baptismal creeds, but twisted the meaning of them to such an extent that the apostolic tradition was fairly submerged. The difficulty became so acute that a General Council of the Church was called at Nicaea in A.D. 325 to settle the question. There the Church repudiated Arianism and put forth a conciliar creed so carefully phrased that misinterpretation would be virtually impossible. It was based on the earlier Creed of Caesarea. Another corruption of Christian teaching caused the Council of Constantinople to revise it in a few particulars. It has been commonly known as the Nicene Creed and was promptly accepted throughout Christendom as the authoritative summary of the Christian Gospel.
These two are what we mean by the “historic Creeds.”3 They have stood the test of many centuries of Christian experience. They are the only statements of faith adopted universally by the undivided Church. Everything in them is taken from the Holy Scriptures, and they consist chiefly of plain facts regarding our Lord Jesus Christ with little or no theological interpretation. Theology grows, changes, develops as human knowledge increases. But there must be something to develop. The creeds are the raw material on which theology works. In the past four centuries a number of other confessions of faith have been launched upon the Christian world in the breaking away of various denominational bodies until many people in a confusion of mind have protested against any creeds at all. But there is really a difference. The historic Creeds are not the creeds of a nation or of a separated body of Christians. They are the products of the universal Church living in unity and speaking in unison. “The Nicene Creed aims at promoting
