We live in a culture highly suspicious of authority; but the Christian faith, luckily for us, still steps forward lovingly and teaches a story that does not diminish me or you. We find our personal fulfillment when we discover our place in the broader work of God in space and time. Otherwise we get stuck in our own egos, and our faith is nothing more than me and my private biases and preferences. "A faith which does not find its justification outside itself remains imprisoned in its own ego and cannot be sustained" (Wolfhart Pannenberg).15 Should Christianity adjust itself to me and my spiritual quest? Or do I discover myself beyond myself? Don't I need a truth that is bigger than me, that challenges my private biases and preferences so I might grow?
Why listen to ancient authors who penned a creed centuries ago? The Church's first theologians were masters of the spiritual life, saints, martyrs, people of intense prayer who took Communion almost daily, people of immense learning who read the Scriptures deeply, passionate to the point of giving up their own lives for the truth. When they disagreed, they seized the opportunity to refine their thinking and discover an even higher truth. Nicholas Lash described their controversies as "people learning to make music, to move closer to the harmony of God, in whom alone all things hold still."16
One of those ancient theologians, after sitting through weeks of heated sessions debating fine points of theology, wrote this:
The holy fathers dealt with problems by common debate. When a disputed question is raised in communal discussion, the light of truth drives out the shadows of falsehood. The truth cannot be made clear in any other way than when there are debates about questions of faith, since everyone requires the assistance of his neighbor.17
I need the assistance of my neighbor to grow into my convictions. The Creed is a way for us, together, to learn to make music, and heated discussion yields more light and drives out falsehood. The Apostles' Creed began with "I believe," but soon all the other major creeds (like the Nicene Creed) shifted to "We believe." Believing is something we do together. "Personal" does not have to mean "private" or "individualistic." When I think about what is "personal" to me, I think about my relationships with other people. The Creed reminds me that I am not sawed off out on a limb when I believe. I believe with you; you believe with me; we help each other to believe; we believe for each other when it's hard to believe. We even have a mystical fellowship with Christians across the globe, and throughout the ages of history. And that is the beauty of the Creed.
So, neighbor, I invite you to this time of thinking, reflection, and even heated discussion together as we work our way through the various sentences of the Creed. I am excited, and I pray to God that through this we will grow in our relationship with God, and with one another. Thank you for joining me in this quest!
Historical Footnote
There are literally hundreds of creeds. Yale just put out a definitive publication that runs to five thick volumes (with accompanying DVD), costing $995.18 Jaroslav Pelikan, the editor, notices "their sheer repetitiveness" and how "the differences between them must seem to any modern reader to be so minute that only a specialist would be able to tell the positions apart, or would even be interested enough to care to do so."19 To learn more about creeds, go to www.creeds.net.If you are preaching or teaching the creeds, you would be wise to retrieve those dusty church history volumes from seminary days and relive the controversies that gave birth to the creeds.
The Apostles' Creed is ancient, although we don't know who wrote it. Originally it was used as Q&A for converts to the faith preparing for Baptism. The more official creed Christians would use was formalized in the year 325, when the emperor Constantine, himself a new convert, summoned more than two hundred bishops to meet at Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) to settle some disagreements about the nature of Jesus. What does it mean to call Jesus divine? And how do we sort out the linkage of the divine and the human in Jesus? Did God make Jesus? Or was Jesus always there? If God shares divinity, is God still God? Debate was heated, but St. Athanasius and his colleagues won the day, arguing that Christ was truly God and always had been, and yet was as fully human as you and me; anything less, and our salvation would be at risk; any less and we would no longer be faithful to the stories in the Bible.
These theologians sought unity, struggling to find the language, the mental categories, to understand who Jesus was, how God works, and how we therefore understand the Christian life. Their ideas were tried, tested, retested, argued, settled upon, reargued; the net result of all this concentrated wisdom and debate was the Nicene Creed, which was revised after more bishops met in 381 at Constantinople, retooled in Ephesus in 431, touched up yet again at Chalcedon (across the Bosporus from Istanbul) in 451, each revision responding to hard questions raised within the Church, and often responding to critics outside the Church.
Millions of people scooped up copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code when it was first published and stumbled upon, slipped into this page-turner, an alleged exposé of early Christianity, suggesting that competing groups jockeyed for power, and that our creeds are the platform espoused by the winners who crushed (and silenced) their foes. But this is not actually how the story unfolded. One theologian did not thump the others, nor did he have a bigger sword. The theologians whose ideas emerged in the creed had the better ideas, they had the logic on their side, they had a better case given all the Bible says, and they also were more in line with the real religious practices of regular rank-and-file Christians of their day. Generally, the Christians who "won" were holy, prayerful people, most of whom had been beaten and imprisoned for their faith; some (such as St. Athanasius) could be ferocious and not always gentle with their foes, but they were theologians more than power brokers.
The fashioning of the Creed was driven by what real, downto-earth Christians had experienced. Consider what Luke Timothy Johnson has written:
The creed does not appear suddenly in history as an imposition from on high. It has been there from the first moments . . . , from the first impulse to articulate experience, from the first effort to defend against distortion, from the first attempt to summarize the story by which this new thing in the world claimed at once to be the people of the one God, yet touched more profoundly and intimately by God than humans had ever before imagined, in the flesh of Jesus, in the Spirit of the risen Lord.20
In striving to understand that profound experience, the Creed helped Christians spot (and avoid) inadequate, misleading versions of Christianity that were not only unfaithful to the Bible, but also subtly dangerous to the inner spirit.
It is interesting to notice that paganism and other religions that were popular during the early years of the Church had no creeds at all. Religion for the pagans was not much about truth, and there was always room for ever more gods. Once you say, "There is one God, and there is such a thing as truth," and especially if you say that truth is embodied in this one human person, Jesus, you need to be able to declare that truth, to sort out what's true and what isn't. Throughout history, Christians have learned the creeds, rethought what the words mean, reconsidered the logic connecting our beliefs, and have published newer creeds, not to replace the older Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, but to clarify more fully for modern times their meaning and implications. Just to have a creed, then, proves that we care about truth and that truth doesn't lurk around any old corner.
Notes
1. Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles' Creed (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1992), 18.
2. Ibid.; see also Theodore W. Jennings, Loyalty to God: The Apostles' Creed in Life and Liturgy (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 14.
3. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 14.
4. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002), 8, demonstrates how, in
