St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER I. OUR CREEDS AND HOW THEY GREW
Where Our Creeds Come From
THE TWO CREEDS in our Prayer Book are very old. They were not invented by the men who prepared a new Prayer Book for our use in 1928, or by the men who prepared our first American Prayer Book in 1789, or even by those who put together the first English Prayer Book, from which ours is directly descended, in 1549. They were old before Washington crossed the Delaware or Columbus discovered America or Charlemagne was crowned emperor in A. D. 800. Probably Christians in Rome and the towns within easy reach of Rome were using a Latin creed much like our Apostles' Creed before A. D. 200. The legend grew up that the twelve Apostles each contributed a clause to it, and that idea, held for many centuries, helped to fix the name by which we know it. Greek creeds much like our Nicene Creed were used in the cities of the Near East about the year A. D. 300. Our Nicene Creed gets its name from the fact that it is very like a creed adopted by a famous meeting of bishops held in A. D. 325 at a place in Asia Minor called Nicea.
These two are the most widely known and used of Christian creeds, but many others have been written and used in various ways in the course of Christian history. The Church of England still uses occasionally the Athanasian Creed. Many of the Churches which were formed at the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, and France agreed upon more elaborate statements of the beliefs to which they pledged their loyalty. Usually these are called "Confessions." Before the time of Christ, the men of the Old Testament had a creed, though they did not call it by that name. We find it in the Book of Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Outside the limits of Christianity, we find a creed among the Mohammedans: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the Apostle of Allah."
The Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds do not belong to our Church alone. They are the possessions of the Church everywhere. That is why they are sometimes called the Catholic creeds, for the original meaning of Catholic is "universal" or "world-wide." Some branches of the Church have them both, other branches have only one of them. They are used differently in different Churches, but they are not the private property of any one part of the Church. If you go into a Roman Catholic church, you can hear them said in Latin. In the Greek churches of the Near East, you can hear the Nicene Creed said in Greek. German Lutherans have them in German and French Protestants have them in French.
When Jesus set out from Nazareth to teach and to heal men and to bring them into a new life with God and one another, His followers had no creed except that of the Old Testament, which they had inherited from their fathers. But it was not long before those who followed Jesus found themselves believing in One whom they had not known before. Jesus Himself was the great new fact in their lives. They came to trust him more and more. The most important thing for them was to be loyal to Him. They felt that He had a rightful claim on them, that they belonged to Him. They called Him their Master.
The men who followed Jesus, and their fathers before them, had been hoping that God would send someone to establish God's rule among them. They called the One for whom they hoped "the Christ," which meant God's Anointed One. He would be set apart to rule as God's representative, as the kings had been set apart in the Old Testament by anointing with oil. Some thought the Christ would be a new and greater David, who would establish a glorious government for God's people. Others thought He would be a powerful angelic figure from heaven, by whom the rule of God would be established on earth. No one expected that He would come in the form of a humble carpenter, without the pomp and armies of an earthly king. But it was not long before the disciples of Jesus became convinced that He was the One for whom they had been hoping, God's chosen King of men, or the Christ. It was He whom God had sent to set up the rule of God in their lives. That was the heart of their new belief.
When men believe something very strongly, they want to put it into words. They want to "tell the world." The first Christians were sure that they had been given in Jesus One who was the answer to their highest hopes and their deepest needs. They declared that conviction by saying that "Jesus is the Christ and Lord," Jesus is God's King of men. They set out to share with other men the truth they had found. That simple statement was the main plank of their platform, what they stood for, the core of their new creed. They were bound together in a close comradeship by sharing that personal loyalty to Jesus. When new members were added to the comradeship of the Church by baptism they were asked to declare their conviction that "Jesus is Lord." If men were ready to accept that, they belonged in the comradeship of the Church.
But this was not the only belief to which the first Christians were seeking to be loyal. Or to express it more truly, Jesus was not the only One in whom they trusted and to whom they gave their allegiance. They trusted more than ever in the God whom Jesus called "Father." Also they had found a new spirit powerfully at work in their own fellowship, a Spirit that had come into their lives from God through Jesus. They trusted that Spirit to guide and strengthen them. So the first seed of the creed unfolded and came to have three parts. They began to baptize new members not only "in the name of Jesus," but "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." They declared their faith in God, the Father; in Jesus, the Christ and Lord; and in the Holy Spirit. When we look at our creeds, which grew out of these early beginnings, we see that they have these three parts as their ground plan or framework.
From what has been said already we can see why men made creeds. They made them for three purposes. First, to express or utter what they believed. When we feel something very strongly, we want to put it into words in order to express what we feel. It is hard to keep still about something for which we care greatly. And when we manage to put it into words we find that we have a better hold on it. It is more truly our own. Men have put their faith in Jesus and the Father and the Spirit into words because they felt the need of giving utterance to what they felt deeply. Secondly, men made creeds because they wanted to share their faith. We do not keep things to ourselves which we think very important and worth while. When we get a new idea or discover something interesting we try to tell others about it. The first Christians had gotten a new idea and they tried to share it by putting it into words. Finally men made creeds to find out who belonged with them and who did not, a test for membership in their society. People belonged with them who shared their deepest convictions. We would not expect a pacifist to join the Navy League or a Republican to join the Socialist party. The Christian Church welcomed people who honestly believed in their God, in their Lord, and in the Spirit at work among them. If men shared their faith they ought to be ready to stand up and say their creed. We shall see as we go on why this way of testing Christians has not always worked well, but that was one of the purposes for which creeds were made.
Creeds are Symbols
One of the oldest names for creed is "symbol." A symbol is something tangible that stands for something not so tangible. Two stars on a flag are a symbol of a major general. A check for ten dollars is a symbol. It is not worth anything by itself. It is only a good check if it stands for money or credit in a bank. A handshake is a symbol of friendliness or agreement between two people. It is not the friendliness or the agreement. Words are our most common and useful symbols. They represent all the things we think of and mean when we communicate with each other. But they are not the things they stand for. The letters e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t are not the same as the animal they represent. It is easy to say the word, but difficult to produce the animal. Symbols are very useful, but never are they perfect and generally far from perfect. If we are asked to write a letter telling exactly what we think about someone we know very well, we are pretty certain to find that we cannot succeed in expressing just what we do think. Certainly we do not imagine that the person who reads the letter will know the man we are writing about just as well as we do, as a result of our words. There are a great many times in life when "words fail us."
It is good to remember that "words fail us" in religion. The creeds are symbols of our faith. They try to put into words what we believe about God and Christ and the Spirit. But there is nothing harder to put into words. God is a great mystery. A three-year-old child can say the word "cat" and know more or less what he means by it. But that child would have a hard time if you asked him for a full description of a cat. A man can easily say the word "God," but it is hard for him to say what he means by it. One of the greatest minds that ever served the Church, St. Augustine, once said that we say some of the things we do about God simply in order that we should not remain silent. The creeds are not that in which we believe; they are symbols that point themselves to the Father and the Son and the Spirit.
More than that, they are symbols that do not belong to us alone. They are not trying to say something for us alone. When we say the creeds we are not uttering our own private thoughts in our own words. If we set out to do that, few of us would speak the language of the creeds. When we say the creeds, we are joining with a great company of men and women of every race and of many centuries to declare the faith that binds us all together in a universal Church. They are a language for Americans and Chinese and Italians and Negroes and Fiji Islanders, for learned men and unlearned alike. They are a way the Church offers us all of standing together and uttering our faith. If we remember that, we shall be more patient when we discover that they do not always say things in just the way we would choose if we were making up our own private creed.
Continue to Chapter II. "I Believe"