The Life We Claim. James C. Howell
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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 the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the faithful "must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically."
5. Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Colorado Springs: Shaw, 2001), 28, speaks of "the faithfulness of doubt," quoting Unamuno: "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God himself."
6. Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 37. Jaroslav Pelikan (Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition [New Haven: Yale, 2003], 65) writes, "When in the interest of the authenticity of the 'experience of Christ as my personal Savior' . . . faith is drained of its doctrinal content, neither the personal Christian experience nor its authenticity can long endure."
7. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 1995), 5.
8. Ibid., 44.
9. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 8.
10. Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (London: SCM, 1991), 4, refers to Cyril of Jerusalem, who said, "Since all cannot read the scriptures, some being hindered from knowing them by lack of education, and others by want of leisure, we comprise the whole doctrine of the Bible in a few lines."
11. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper, 1959), 23.
12. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 9.
13. Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale, 2003), xiii.
14. Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed (Harrisburg,