No doubt every writer has projects he begins—or thinks to begin—and then, for one reason or another, puts aside, only to return to them later. This essay is one such project of mine.
I grew up a child of the Radical Reformation, a member of a church where the people refused to accept the label “Protestant,” calling themselves “Christians only.” I knew much of my Bible, but little of what others who called themselves Christians believed. This was especially true of any church that embraced the name “Catholic.” Of those churches in particular, I knew very little, other than the fact that they were wrong. When, in due time, my ignorance gave way to acquaintance, one of the things that most impressed me about Catholic Christianity was how the entire congregation recited the Nicene Creed at every mass, every liturgy. A few years later, when, in one of life’s many ironies, my reading of such Old Western Men as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton had led me into the Eastern Orthodox Church (which is, as they will eagerly tell you, Catholic, but not Roman), I learned to recite that Creed, and was fascinated by the way in which the Creed compressed so much truth into so few words, practically all of them culled from the Holy Scriptures themselves.
At first, I had the thought to write an essay examining the Creed, and showing how its very words were taken from the Holy Book of Books, but it soon struck me as a pedantic and unnecessary exercise, so I laid my notes aside.
Then, while relaxing in the library of the local university, which happens to be my own ever-so-anti-Catholic alma mater, I happened to see a cover story in a certain journal, proclaiming the wrongness and divisiveness of creeds. It was an enjoyable read, so far as it went, but I noticed something strange about the whole thing: in this article, the author rejected all creeds, but he never actually dealt with any; instead, he only dealt with certain Protestant doctrinal manuals, with one quick obligatory swipe at the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I saw no evidence in the text that the author had ever even read the Nicene Creed; nor, apparently, had he ever been to his local Catholic or Orthodox Church of a Sunday, where he could have heard it with his own ears.
So, even if it is pedantic, it is apparently also necessary that someone explain that the Nicene Creed—recited regularly (admittedly, with some rather contentious variations) by the majority of Christians around the world—is no mere creation of men, but the very words of the Word of God, condensed and slightly clarified by the casuistic cut-and-thrust of several centuries of doing what the Church is charged with doing: defending the Faith from heretics.
As a prelude to examining it in detail, I present the text of the Creed itself, in one of its traditional English translations (the original having been composed, of course, in Greek):
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and of
all things, visible and invisible; and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the
Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, Very God
of Very God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all
things were made; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and
was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; and
the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into
heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again in
glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth
from the Father, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified,
Who spoke by the Prophets; And I believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic
Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the
resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
It is easily seen that the core of the Creed is a skeletal framework consisting of a series of affirmations of various one’s; sometimes with the oneness expressed implicitly through the use of the definite article with the singular number (e.g. “I believe in the [one] Holy Spirit”). Here is that framework, presented in its pure skeletal beauty:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…and in
one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God…by whom all things were made…And I
believe in the Holy Spirit…And I believe in One…Church. I acknowledge one
baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the
life of the world to come. Amen.
This essential core of phrases and clauses—along with those which flesh out the full form of the Creed—is practically built word-for-word from the language of the scriptures, as I shall now endeavor to show.
The obvious source for the core of all this is the baptismal formula, in which one is baptized “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Mat. 28.19), but one need not seek too far for the rest, as well; it is all to be found in passages very familiar to any serious reader of the scriptures. First, we must recall that the Church is several times in the New Testament called “the body [of Christ].” I give but two examples, both from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “And he [Christ] is the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1.18); “I Paul…now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church” (Col. 1.23-24). Bearing in mind this truth (“body” = “church”), and using it as an interpretive lens, we can see that much that is said in the Creed is also said by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians (with the most pertinent parts emphasized):
For this cause I bow my knee unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…[that
you might] be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man…There is
one body [ i.e. the church], and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all”
(Eph. 3.14-16, 4.4-6)
Looking back at our list of one’s, we see that they are all present in this passage, excepting only the resurrection and the life to come. The words of the Creed, we begin to see, are the words of the Word of God.
We continue to see this as we look at another of St. Paul’s epistles, Second Corinthians. There, St. Paul, paraphrasing the ancient writings of Israel, gives the words of the Lord thus (again, with key words emphasized): “And I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6.17-18). Combining this language with the previous passage’s “one God and Father,” gives us the language of the Creed: “one God, the Father Almighty.”
Having combined the language of Second Corinthians and Ephesians, we then invoke Exodus 20.11 (“For…the Lord made heaven and earth”) and Colossians 1.16 (“For by him were all things created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers: all things were created by him and for him.”) In the latter of these two passages, we see that St. Paul picks up the theme articulated in Exodus and expands upon it: he uses “create” rather than “make” (and so reaches back behind Exodus to the very first words of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”), and makes the object of that verb “things…visible and invisible”; he ends by emphasizing that all things were created both “by him” and “for him.” Finally, let us notice that the “him” referred to here is Christ, “the Father[’s]…dear son” (Col. 1.12-13), to whom St. Paul applies such divine honors, without, of course denying that they would logically apply equally to the Father.
Before we summarize on this point, we must look at one more passage, this time from St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians: “yet to us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we in him, and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Cor. 8.6).
Behold, how much of the Creed is merely an abbreviated form of the language of St. Paul! Combining his words in Ephesians, Colossians, and First and Second Corinthians, with a bit of language borrowed from Exodus, we can then formulate the first article of the Creed, with a bit already of the second:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty [1 Cor. 8.6; 2 Cor. 6.18], the Maker of
heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible [Ex. 20.11; Col. 1.16];
and in one Lord, Jesus Christ [1 Cor. 8.6]…by whom all things were made [Col.
1.16].
On the Holy Spirit
Before treating the heart of the Creed which deals with Christ, let us continue to build, and then fill out, our basic framework of one’s. This requires that we skip over (for the moment) a great deal of material, but let us also pause to notice something here: it is a strange fact that the Creed does not, as one might expect, list a number of abstract facts which we Christians believe to be true. Instead, we “believe” not in facts, but in persons—four, to be exact: the Father; the Holy Spirit; Jesus Christ; and His Bride, the Church. The other things mentioned in the Creed are things we “acknowledge” (or “confess”) or “look for.” The meat of the Creed are the clauses that serve to specify the ones in whom we believe—answering questions such as: Which God? Which Lord? What Holy Spirit? What Church?—lest we be in any way confused and turn from the true way, whether to the right or to the left. The bulk of this specifying language concerns Christ. This is not only because of how central Christ is to our faith, but also because so many of the heresies the Creed was specifically formulated to combat were heresies concerning Christ. The many clauses referring to him establish the boundaries of orthodox thinking about him. We should remember that rules are made to combat error, and for every statement the Creed makes about Christ (or the Father, or the Spirit), there was generally someone somewhere who proclaimed the truth to be otherwise. That is why the Creed was made.
And so it is that the section of the Creed which deals with Christ is quite long. We will bracket it for the moment to complete our basic framework. After Christ, the Creed treats the Holy Spirit. Of course, we know of the importance of the Spirit, if for no other reason than that we invoke His name in baptism, as we do the name of the Father and the name of the Son. But, as before, with the Son, the Creed not only tells us that we believe in the Spirit; it also tells us which Spirit we believe in. This Spirit is not only the Holy Spirit (for we should remember that not all spirits are holy), but He is also “the Lord.” This is a good place to note how the early Church expanded on the Jewish tradition it inherited. An essential element of Jewish spiritual life in the first century AD was the text from Deut. 6.4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” In the original Hebrew, the covenantal name of God—YHWH (these are the consonants in the written Hebrew, which did not record vowel sounds; the proper pronunciation is uncertain)—occurs where the English and other translations have “Lord” or its equivalent. This was the basic confession of faith for the ancient Israelite, or the first-century Jew. The early Church—all of whom, prior to the conversion of Cornelius’ household (and a large number of them for many years thereafter), were Jews—expanded this confession of Jewish monotheism so as to include Jesus Christ within it—and within the covenantal name YHWH— without its ceasing to affirm monotheism. We see this in the quote given above from 1 Corinthian 8.6, where St. Paul modifies the words from Deuteronomy so as to include both the Father and Jesus Christ within the God who is “one Lord”: “yet to us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we in him, and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things, and we by him” (N.T. Wright explains this particular point far better than I possibly could in his biography of the Apostle, called simply Paul: a Biography; I recommend it highly).
But just as St. Paul includes Jesus within the One True God by referring to him as the “one Lord,” so he also includes the Spirit therein, within what we have come to call the Trinity (yes, the term itself is post-Biblical, as all will admit; but then again, so is the term “electricity,” and the power company still expects me to pay them). In 2 Corinthians 3, St. Paul speaks of the passage in Exodus where Moses veils the glory that shines from his face after his conference with the Lord (the word translated “Lord” in Ex. 34.28 is again the name YHWH). Then, having just referred to this passage which speaks of “the Lord,” St. Paul says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit,” and proceeds to speak of our transformation by “the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3.17-18).
And so it is that we should not be surprised that the Creed says, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord.” This is simply a statement, following the language of St. Paul that the Spirit is “the Lord [i.e. YHWH].” Now, an English reader of the Creed might be forgiven for reading the next few words, “the Lord and Giver of Life,” to mean “the Lord of Life, and the Giver thereof.” But this is not what the original Greek says. There, “the Giver of life” is a single word: Zōopoion (Zωοποιον), “the one who makes alive.” This second description (after “the Lord”) reflects a number of passages which associate “spirit” with life. An excellent example is Romans 8.11: “But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken [i.e. give life to] your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you”; but the Spirit’s life-giving role is not necessarily limited to the resurrection, which, after all, receives its own separate mention in the Creed. Another verse clearly expressing the Spirit’s life-giving role is John 7.38, where Christ says, “He that believeth on me…out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water”; in the next verse, the narrator explains, “but this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believed on him were to receive.”
While these verses convey the idea of the Spirit giving life, there is one verse that uses the exact expression taken up into the Creed, although it is generally obscured by the way the English versions translate it. In John 6—a passage we shall have much reason to return to when treating what the Creed says of Christ—Jesus foreshadows what he shall later teach his disciples of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, when he says “Verily, Verily I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him up at the Last Day” (John 6.53-54). When his disciples find this saying “hard,” he seeks to help them avoid reading his words as a call to cannibalism—without reducing it all to mere symbolism, which his language is too intense to allow for—by saying “It is the Spirit that quickeneth [i.e. gives life], the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (6.63). The statement “It is the Spirit that quickeneth” more literally reads “the Spirit is the one that makes alive,” using the same word include in the Creed: Zōopoion / Zωοποιον. While this passage may be speaking merely of spirit versus flesh, rather than of the Holy Spirit specifically, it can certainly be affirmed that if spirit is life-giving, then the Holy Spirit is even more so, being the source of the life-giving power of all spirit. Thus, the Church takes this word from the lips of Christ to describe the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit spoken of so often in the scriptures.
The rest of the passage on the Spirit is fairly easy to explain. After he is called “the Lord, and Giver of life,” we proclaim that he “proceedeth from the Father,” essentially a direct quotation of Christ’s words in John 15.26: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” Thus, one clause in the Creed concerning the Spirit records this fact: that He proceeds from the Father. What exactly does that mean? I don’t know—exactly. But I don’t have to know, exactly. Knowing where the borders of belief are, that is enough.
It should be noted that one of the great causes of division among those who call themselves Christians is that those in the West at one point added to the Latin version of this clause the expression “and [from] the Son” (in Latin, it is one word: Filioque.). Ever since, this has been a point of contention (but not the only one, alas) between Orthodox in the East and all creedal Christians in the West, especially Catholics. But such is not my topic. My point here is that the original, shorter expression (the only one I am trying to defend) is directly taken from the words of Christ himself.
Some might protest, “but how can you say you believe something when you don’t understand the thing that you claim to believe?” The answer is seen by looking closely at what the Creed does and does not say. We do not confess “I believe that the Spirit proceeds from the Father,” but “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceedeth from the Father.” The faith being confessed here is not intellectual assent, so much as personal trust. God is my Father, and I place my trust in Him, and also in His Holy Spirit, who proceeds from Him; this is the Spirit Jesus sent as Comforter. I can believe and trust in all three, and in what they proclaim about themselves and their relationship, without having any detailed understanding of the intricacies of that relationship. In the same way, if my father were a physicist specializing in quantum electrodynamics; if he told me that he loved his job, and also that he loved my mother; even if I were a mere child of 5, I could trust completely in him and the truth of what he said, even though I had no idea what his job involved, or why he loved it, or how his love for his job differed—as I should hope it would—from his love for my mother; even though I knew nothing of the mystery of the love between a man and his wife, nor of the likewise mysterious love of this man for his math—all my ignorance would not invalidate my childlike, implicit trust in my parents, and what they told me. In a similar way, I can confess my faith—which our Lord tells us should be that of a little child—in all three persons of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and in the truth of what they tell us about themselves and their relationships, though the mysteries may be as far beyond me as the mathematics of quantum electrodynamics. As Cornel West once said in a similar context, “comprehension is not a prerequisite of cooperation”—nor of trust.
Once it has been established that the Holy Spirit is indeed “the Lord,” and that he proceeds from the Father, it remains only to emphasize this truth as a corollary: that he “with the Father & the Son together is [therefore to be] worshiped and glorified.” The Spirit is fully God, and therefore, contra many heretics, is worthy of worship and honor. This is not a scriptural quotation or paraphrase, but a logical inference from what has been said about the Spirit’s divine status.
Finally, we are told that this is the same Spirit “Who spoke by the prophets.” There are, of course, verses that show this to be true (such as 1 Peter 1.11, which calls the Spirit within the prophets “the Spirit of Christ”; cf. also 2 Peter 1.21: “prophecy came not in olden times by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as were moved by the Holy Spirit.”), but the reason this truth had to be explicitly stated in the Creed is that we humans are both stupid, and prone to falling in love with our own conceptions. Hence come heresies. And among the many stupid heresies the Church has had to refute has been one which claimed that the Spirit of the New Testament, “the Comforter…whom I will send unto you…who proceedeth from the Father”; who came at Pentecost—that this Spirit was not the same Spirit in the Old Testament, “who spoke by the prophets.” In the Creed, the Church declares, “Yes, He is.”
On the Church
It is a commonly heard refrain today: many people like Jesus, but they do not like the Church. Similarly, many describe themselves as “spiritual,” but claim they dislike “organized religion” (judging by how much of the growth of Christianity today is growth of certain charismatic types of Christianity, it would seem many professed Christ-followers prefer their religion very much un-organized, but let that pass). The earliest Christians, however, were not like this. The Apostles went about laying on hands and appointing bishops (the word is an English corruption of the original Greek episcopoi, meaning overseers or supervisors) and priests (i.e. presbuteroi—“elders”—of which “priest” is just an English corruption[1]) in every congregation (cf. Titus 1.5). They urged the people to “hold the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Th. 2.15). When it became necessary to formulate a creed, to more precisely define the parameters of belief, the Church herself was an essential element affirmed in that creed.
Belief in the Church is embedded in but a single clause of the Creed, only nine words long in English (and seven in Greek)—thus does the Church balance the demands of humility and verity—but that clause contains four separate adjectives to describe the Church to which it refers. Firstly, the Church is said to be “one,” echoing St. Paul’s statement in Ephesians that there is “one body” (4.4). It is at this point that all us Christians—whether we recite the Creed or only read the Bible upon which it is based—should take some time to bemoan, beweep, and bewail our own parts in violating this essential principle of our faith. Go on. This essay should still be here when we’re done.
There. That was good for us. Let’s make that a regular thing, shall we?
So, the Creed describes the Church as “one.” Since the Church is both the body of Christ and the Bride of Christ (cf. Mat. 9.15; John 3.29; 2 Cor. 11.2; Rev. 21.2), it is only fitting that it should be so. The Creed also describes the Church as “holy.” This, again is language with clear scriptural precedent. In the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus (admittedly not the most riveting reading, but not without its lusters), God says to the gathered congregation of Israel—and not for the first time in that book—“Ye shall be holy, for I, the Lord thy God am holy” (19.2; cf. 11.44-45). In the New Testament, St. Peter quotes these same words to encourage his audience to be holy (1 Peter 1.16). Then there are all those epistles addressed to “the saints,” that is, in the original language, “the holy ones.” I could give more detail, but I trust I have made my point.
Indeed, as I look back through the scriptures, I see how thoroughly the imagery of “body,” “bride,” “holy” (and its close equivalent in this case, “chaste”) and “one” are woven together. Just read Eph. 5.22-32 and 2 Cor. 11.2-3. I suspect I have just scratched the surface of something here.
Okay, now comes the hard part. In the last 500 years, few theological terms have been more maligned, more misunderstood, and more misused as both means and motive for man’s inhumanity to man than the word “catholic.” The word itself is translated by Liddel & Scott in their Greek lexicon as simply “general, universal,” but it is rarely translated at all and is often left in its original form whatever language is being used, making it perhaps one of those words, which every language has, which are not strictly translatable outside the context of that language It must be admitted that the word itself does not appear in the New Testament, but it must also be admitted that it is very much present in the early post-New Testament writings of the Church. It is used by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch in the epistles he writes on his way to martyrdom circa AD 108: “Wherever the bishop appear, there let the multitude be; even as wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Smyrnaeans” 8.2). The Catholicity of the Church relates to its oneness, since the Church, being one, is thereby universal in both space and time, as well as in doctrine and teaching. Hence perhaps the simplest explanation of catholic teaching is that it is what has been believed “everywhere, always, by all” (St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2.6, 5th century).
So, while the word “catholic” may not appear in the New Testament, the concept in question is quite biblical, since it involves following such injunctions as these: “Ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee” (Deut. 32.7); “hold the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Th. 2.15). There are no doubt other verses I could multiply, but these two witnesses from the two testaments serve to establish the point: catholicity is good (what exactly catholicity consists in, this is debated by East and West, Anglican and Roman; which is why I confine myself to the lighter task of proving this: he who “believe[s] in One…Catholic…Church” is not thereby doing anything contrary to scripture, Christianity, or Christ).
One final dimension of the Church’s catholicity is its catholicity in language and culture. Since the Holy Spirit fell upon first the disciples, then the household of Cornelius (Acts 2.1ff; 10.1ff), the Church has been open to all men and women of every color, race, culture and tongue. Wherever the Church went, it translated the Scriptures and church services into the native tongues of the people. Russian and some related languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet today because the missionary saints Cyril and Methodius invented an alphabet with which to record what had previously been the unwritten languages of unlettered peoples. Furthermore, far from rejecting as evil all the cultures they encountered, the early Church assimilated the learning of the Greeks and claimed pre-Christian philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as brothers. When they went to China, their translations read, “In the beginning was the Tao [the Way]”, for they perceived that this was the best way to translate Logos (the Greek word translated “Word” in John 1) into the thought categories of that culture—the Tao being an essential concept in so many cultures of the Far East. They took the name of God (YHWH, which is related to the Hebrew for “to be”) and the related recurring term, “I Am,” (as in, “before Abraham was, I am” [John 8.58]) and translated it into the categories of Greek thought as: ο ων (o ōn), “the one who is”—forever after, these three letters would be found in the halo about the head of Christ in icons:
As a longtime fan of Star Trek, and specifically of Spock of Vulcan, I cannot help but wonder how the catholicity of the Church would respond if it were ever to encounter real-life disciples of Surak, spiritual father of the Vulcan people.
Alas, I can only imagine.
The Church is also confessed in the Creed to be “Apostolic.” This term no doubt has many nuances, but one of them is surely that the Church “continue[s] steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine [i.e. teaching]” (Acts 2.42). Furthermore, consider the following two passages, which emphasize not only the apostolic foundation of the Church, but also its continuity with Israel, her patriarchs, and her prophets (by whom the Holy Spirit spoke), as well as the previously considered themes of the holiness and unity of the Church, and her unity with the Lord, who is Father, Son, and Spirit (important words have been emphasized):
Christ Jesus…is our peace, who hath made both [Jew and Gentile] one…in one body…For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are…fellowcitizens with the saints [i.e. “the holy ones”], and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit…that the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ (Eph. 2.13-3.6).
And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband…And there came unto me one of the seven angels…saying, ‘Come hither; I will show thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife’…and [he] showed me that great city, the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of Heaven from God, having the glory of God…[It] had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels; and names were written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel…and the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the name of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Rev. 21.2-14).
Clearly, the Church ought to be “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” These passages present us with one church, the bride of one husband; accepting of all, whether Jew or Gentile, in a single, universal, catholic embrace; repeatedly described as “holy,” with saints (holy ones) for citizens, founded on the foundation stones of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as the very cornerstone of the entire structure.
Baptism, Resurrection, And the Life of the World to Come
After dealing with the Trinity and the Church, the Creed speaks of three other things that are of great enough importance that they each receive their own article. First, we confess, or acknowledge (either translation will do) one baptism for remission of sins. This simple statement combines St. Paul’s words already considered about there being “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4.5) with St. Peter’s words as to baptism’s purpose, when he commanded the crowd at Pentecost to “be baptized…for the remission of sins” (Acts 2.38). On that point, apparently, no more needed to be said, and so no more shall be said here.
And finally, we “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” These two ideas are, appropriately, conjoined very closely as the compound object of the verb “look for.” The resurrection is mentioned practically last, not because it is least (far from it), but because it is the quintessential “last thing.” The resurrection, for a Christian, is his end, not in the sense of where he stops, but in the sense of where he was going; not where he ceases to be, but where he wanted to be in the first place. It is our end, as in the question, “does the end justify the means?”—where “end” means “goal” or “purpose.” We see this in St. Paul, where he says, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection…that by some means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead” (Phil. 3.8-11). The next five verses are a description of the passion with which he struggles to attain to this, his ultimate goal.
And so we see in this passage from Philippians not only the language of the Creed, but also why it was important enough to include and appropriately placed at the end. Another very relevant passage might be the first two verses of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which speak “of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment” (6.1-2). Verse one refers to these things as “ the word of the first things of Christ” (“the principle of the doctrine of Christ” in the KJV), and as “the foundation” (6.1). This seems to be a list of basic doctrines taught to new Christians, which the author of this letter—itself probably a sermon—is therefore going to bypass to speak of things he cannot expect his audience to already know. Here we see that among the first principles taught to Christians as early as the middle of the first century (the present tense language of Hebrews about the priests and the temple suggests that the fall of the Temple in AD 70 had not happened yet) are the very things that would later be embedded in the Creed: 1. Believing in God 2. repentance & baptism 3. Laying on of hands (to ordain deacons, priests, and bishops in Apostolic succession) 4. Resurrection of the dead 5. Eternal judgment (and the life in the world that comes after).
We could go on to cite other verses on the resurrection. Christ speaks of it more than once (cf. Mat. 22.23-33; Lk. 14.14; John 6.54). St. Paul gives us a lengthy discourse on the resurrection in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians. But this is not an essay on the resurrection, but on the Creed, and we have yet to speak of “the life of the world to come.” Of this there is little to say, beyond the idea that this is that “eternal life” Christ promises his followers in “the world to come” (Mark 10.30; cf. Lk. 18.30) after the resurrection (When “I [Christ] will raise him [“Whosoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood{, who} hath eternal life”] up at the Last Day” [John 6.54]) in “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…and he that sat upon the throne said ‘Behold, I make all things new’” (Rev. 21.1-5). The expression “world to come” is found in the words of Christ in Matthew (12.32), Mark (10.30), and Luke (18.30), while in John he speaks of “the Last Day” (6.40, 54). The same expression, “world to come,” occurs twice in Hebrews (2.5, 6.5).
On Christ
Between “one Lord, Jesus Christ” and “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” there is a great deal of material in the Creed about Jesus. Indeed, the majority of the Creed is specifically about him. The Creed has more to say about Jesus than about anyone or anything else, primarily because he is the heart and soul of what is, after all, called the Christian faith—and, for that very reason, there were so many false ideas about him which needed correcting. And so, the Creed contains many statements about Jesus, again taken almost directly from the scriptures, encapsulating in but a few words the essential truths about this most important of men—their purpose being, of course, that we may know exactly who it is in whom we are professing our belief.
First, Christ is described as “the Son of God, the Only-begotten.” We can find the first of these expressions simply by turning to the Gospel of Mark, which opens with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1.1). Then we turn to John’s Gospel, where the prologue describes “the Word”—who is Christ—as “the only Begotten of the Father” (John 1.1, 14). Both images are found later in that gospel in the most well-known of New Testament passages, John 3.16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” In its phrasing, the Creed keeps the two descriptions separate, so as make the truth contained in these verses absolutely clear: Jesus is the Son of God, and the Only-begotten.
If only we could leave it at that. Alas, as I said before (but it is so true it bears repeating) we humans are both stupid, and prone to falling in love with our own conceptions; and few theological topics have been the subject of more stupid conceptions and misconceptions than the person and work of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Creed proceeds to specify more precisely who Christ is, so as to ward off more false notions. He was not simply “begotten,” he was “begotten of the Father [John 1.14] before all worlds.” Here, the Greek word translated “worlds” means “ages,” and so the English version uses “worlds” in what is now an antique temporal sense, where “world” means a period of time.[2] Christ, we are told, was begotten outside time: before all ages. Again, Christ’s own words provide the evidence for this, with some of the language. He tells us, “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8.58); in his prayer to the Father in John 17, he says, “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was…for thou lovedst me before the foundations of the world” (John 17.5, 24; here “world” has its more modern sense, but still…). Indeed, not only was Christ begotten before all ages, we are told in Hebrews 1.2 that it was Christ “by whom he [God] made the worlds [ages].” Logically, you cannot make something unless you exist before it, thus, he “by whom…[God] made the worlds” must have been begotten before them.
Of course, while Christ is “begotten,” and so is of or from the Father, this does not imply that his existence is any less eternal than the Father’s. The following phrases in the Creed continue to hammer home this very point, that Christ not only preceded all creation (“all worlds”), but is himself something other than a created thing. He is “Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father”—then we are back at 1 Cor. 8.6: “by whom all things were made.” Again, we see the English used here is quite old and traditional: “very,” as used here, means “true” (it being from the Latin veritas, meaning “truth”) so that “very God of very God” means “true God of true God.” This use of “very” to mean “true” is similar to the King James use of the word “verily,” which meant “truly.” In Christ’s time prefacing a statement with “Amen, Amen, I say unto you” was a way to insist that what came next was a true statement; even today, we often say “Amen”—a word of Hebrew origin, by the way—as a way of saying “that’s true.” The King James translators conveyed this to the people of their own time by rendering this as “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” a usage similar to “very God of very God.”
The point of all this language is to combat all those ideas which would make Christ something less than what he is: the Eternal, Divine Son, one with the Father. Again, the scriptures give us our source material. We are informed in scripture that “God is light” (I John 1.5), while Christ is called “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1.9). He himself had said “I am the light of the world”—then he cured a blind man, just to make his point (John 9.5ff.). He had addressed his Father in prayer as “the only true God” (John 17.3), yet he said “I and my Father are one” (John 10.30). Finally, Rev. 21.23 states of the New Jerusalem, “the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamb [i.e. Christ] is the light thereof.”
With all this Biblical data to work from, the Church, in formulating the Creed, insisted on language which would avoid any diminution of Christ’s status. Against all those who said that Christ was the first and highest of all created things—but still, a creation—that he was divine in the sense of having a created nature “like” that of the Father—against all this, the church insisted that, as the glory of God did lighten the New Jerusalem, and that light was Christ the Lamb, it was thus only logical to say of Christ that he is “Light of [or “from”] Light.” He was not a divine creature, with an essence “like” that of the Father—rather, he was “the only Begotten of the Father,” who is “the only true God” (John 1.14; 17.3), and since like begets like, it was only logical to call him “Very God of Very God.” Finally, his oneness with the Father was explained as a unity of essence: “of one essence with the Father.” This was one of the few times—if not the only time—the Church used language taken more from philosophy than from scripture to build the Creed, but it was seen as necessary to express with sufficient clarity the truth of the matter.
If we wanted to expand this text to make its meaning as clear as we could, we might do it like this:
[Truly] God, [begotten] from [True] God; begotten, NOT MADE [as opposed to “heaven and earth, and all thing visible and invisible,” which were made]; of one essence with the Father [not “like” or “similar”—but one and the same] by whom all things were made [i.e. he is creator, not creature].
Incarnation
Now that we have made it very clear who and what Jesus is, at least in relation to the Father, there is still the task of recording what he did, does, and shall do. Like the scriptures—only more so—the Creed boils his life down into three parts: his birth; his ministry and death; and his resurrection, with what comes after. First, since he is God’s Son (cf. Matt. 2.15 for another occurrence of the idea from another angle), he must, to fulfill his mission as “Christ” (a
Greek term which, like the Hebrew “Messiah” referred to the anointed king of Israel, the promised Son of David, who would save them all) become a man, an Israelite, a Jew (let us who bear the name “Christian” never forget that the man we worship as God was a Jew, like the prophets before him and the Apostles after him; the term “anti-Semitic Christian” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms). This is the “Incarnation,” the act in which the Word of God who was “with God” in Heaven came down from Heaven, was enfleshed or embodied (the English meaning of the Latin-derived incarnate) and, taking our human flesh and nature as his own, became one of us. The Creed, in its quest for fullness and clarity, mentions all three steps: “[He] came down from Heaven and was incarnate…and was made man.”
The language of coming down from Heaven is taken directly from the words of Jesus himself in the Gospel of John. There, after some of the people speaking to him quote words from the Psalms about bread from Heaven, he says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from Heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from Heaven. For the bread of God is he that cometh down from Heaven, and giveth life unto the world…I am that bread of life…I came down from Heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him who sent me.” (John 6.32-38; cf. 6.41, 42, 50, 51, 58, 62 for multiple recurrences of the same image, the last speaking of “the Son of Man ascend[ing] up where he was before.” ).
The scriptures also speak of Christ taking on our flesh and becoming man, and we may start where we were, in John 6. There, after speaking of his being the bread of life which came down from Heaven, Jesus says, “the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6.51). These words look both back, to the start of John’s Gospel, which mentions “the Word…made flesh” in its fourteenth verse, and forward, to the crucifixion, that event whither all of the Gospel is tending, where he will give his flesh for the world, and its life. The narrator of John’s Gospel is the first voice in that book to mention the incarnation. In that Gospel’s famous opening lines we are told “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1.1, 14). The verb translated “dwelt” here is related to the Greek noun for “tent” or “tabernacle,” so the image suggests Christ becoming incarnate, wearing our flesh about him like a tent that he will “put off” at his death (briefly, since he will put it on again on the third day at his resurrection), even as St. Peter would later write of his own immanent death, “shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shown me” (2 Peter 1.14). St. Paul also speaks of Christ’s incarnation and humanity. He notes that Christ was “made [and what he was made, of course, was “man”] of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom. 1.3) and became “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2.5). So we can see that while the word “incarnation”—like the word “Trinity”—is not found in the New Testament, the idea of it—and even the language for it—most certainly is.
Of course, we must remember that in all these occurrences of “man,” whether in the scriptures or in the Creed, the word used in Greek is anthropos (ανθρωπος), which means simply “human,” and emphasizes Jesus’ humanity, not his maleness This includes the expression “for us men” in the Creed. In no way are women excluded from the saving work of “the human, Messiah Jesus” (to translate 1 Tim. 2.5 another way). We are told by the Creed, at the beginning of the passage that describes Christ’s work on Earth, that he did all the things that follow “for us [humans] and for our salvation.” This was made clear at the very beginning of his time on Earth, and was incorporated into his very name, for when the angel appeared to Joseph, the husband of Mary, he was told of the child she had conceived “you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt.1.21). Like many prophets, Jesus had a name which suggested his purpose: in its original Hebrew form, it means “the Lord saves.” And here we see that Jesus will be the savior of “his people.” In Matthew’s Gospel, these words clearly point to Jesus as the savior of the Jews, the fulfillment of their Messianic expectations, a very common theme in the Gospel of Matthew. However, Jesus often speaks of his purpose in broader terms. In the words just quoted above from John’s Gospel, he will give his flesh “for the life of the world,” “world” being a word (Kosmos / Κοσμος, source of the English word “cosmos”) which refers not just to all people, but to the whole of Creation. Jesus had spoken the same way when he spoke to Nicodemus in chapter three, saying, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3.16). Here we see it all laid out simply, much as it will recur in chapter six: Jesus came down from Heaven (“God sent…his son into the world”) to give his flesh for the life of the world (“that whosoever believeth in him should…have everlasting life…[so] that the world through him might be saved”). These passages show us not only that Christ came to earth “for our salvation,” that is, the salvation of “us [humans],”—indeed, of “the world”—but that what he saves us from is both “[our] sins” and death itself (for we “[shall] not perish, but have everlasting life”). This should put us in mind of what the Revelation says, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…And he that sat upon the throne [i.e. Christ] said, ‘Behold, I make all things new’” (Rev. 21.1, 5).
In light of all this, we could say that one flaw we might suggest in the Creed is that the language is not broad enough, since “the world” includes more than just “us [humans].” This can tend to obscure our ecological responsibilities, the responsibilities to “dress…and keep” (Gen. 2.15) this garden of a planet upon which we have been set (there is a reason they call the region of Earth’s orbit “the Goldilocks Zone”: everything outside it is either too hot, like Mercury & Venus, or too cold, like Mars). Still, the Church, like all of us, is awakening to the importance of planetary care. We can see this in the ecological vision of such Christian leaders as Pope Francis and Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. And if we need further inducement, let us turn to the writings of Wendell Berry, who has been for decades a bit of a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
There is one more aspect of the incarnation noted in the Creed. It not only records that Christ was incarnate, but that he was “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.” Here is one instance where the Creed cannot be much more succinct than the scriptures it derives from, for the truth it records here is found expressed very briefly in Matthew’s Gospel: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was [thus]: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1.18). This passage records the three essential facts preserved in the words of the Creed: 1. Mary was the mother of Jesus 2. She conceived him while still a virgin 3. This miraculous conception was by the work of the Holy Spirit. These same essential facts are repeated several times in the course of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Joseph is told by an angel that Mary’s pregnancy is “of the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 1.20. Mary herself receives the news of her conception by the Holy Spirit (and she asserts her virginity) in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel (esp. vv. 34-35). In addition to recording their relationship in 1.16 (“Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ”) and quoting Isaiah 7.14 (“A virgin shall…bring forth a son”) in 1.23, Matthew refers to Mary as Jesus’ “mother” or to him as her “son” seven times in the first two chapters of his gospel (Mat. 1.18, 25; 2.11, 13, 14, 20, 21).
This is, of course, the basis of the long tradition of referring to Mary as Mater Theou (Ματηρ Θεου), often presented in icons in the contracted form MΡ ΘY), “Mother of God,”
Θ
or by the Greek term Theotokos (“Birth-giver of God”). For if she is really, as the scriptures say, “[She] of whom was born Jesus” (Mat. 1.16); if she really was “his mother” (Mat. 1.18); if he really is “Very God of Very God”—then the only way to affirm both A. that Jesus is God & B. that Mary is his mother, of whom he was born, while denying C. that she is thus properly to be called both Theotokos & Mother of God—the only way to do this is to abandon logical thought and proper grammar altogether, so that one refuses to see the plain and simple truth: that if one affirms A & B, C logically follows. This is, of course, not strictly a matter concerning the Creed, but rather a matter which is logically entailed both by it and by the scriptures upon which it is based. And since I am nothing if not logical, I could not refrain from pointing out that, given the Biblical data, one can refuse Mary these titles only at the cost of one’s reason.
Death, Resurrection, & After
After the Incarnation, the Creed wastes no time in getting to the next important point: Christ’s death; all the details of his life between his birth and his death are passed over in silence. The words immediately following “and was made man” record five essential facts: 1. Christ was crucified 2. This occurred “under Pontius Pilate,” who, as all readers of the Gospels know, was the procurator of Judea at the time. 3. This crucifixion was “also, for us.” 4. In this crucifixion, “[He] suffered” 5. He “was buried.” There is no difficulty finding scriptures to back up these claims (all four Gospels record all these facts); the amazing thing is that so much is summarized so briefly. The Creed records the barest facts about Good Friday: that Christ was crucified and buried, that in these events, he suffered, that this was “also, for us,” and that it all happened “under Pontius Pilate.” Pilate is thus the only human outside the Holy Family mentioned by name in the Creed. This is no doubt done to anchor the events in space and time, to ensure that we who recite the Creed do not forget that the Crucifixion happened at a certain place (outside the gates of Jerusalem, in the Roman province of Judea) at a certain time (during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, during the 30’s of the First Century AD). The other details recoded include the facts that Christ “suffered,” which is no doubt included to refute those heretics who could not abide the idea that God actually suffered on the cross and died. Yet the scriptures testify abundantly to Christ’s suffering, beginning with his time in the Garden of Gethsemane, where “being in an agony he prayed…earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Lk. 22.44). After his arrest, he was beaten and mocked (Lk. 22.63-65), he was scourged (Mat. 27.26), and, of course, he was crucified, than which no more painful means of execution has ever been devised.
The three little words, “also, for us” look back to the earlier expression “for us men and for our salvation.” The first word, “also,” indicates that not only Christ’s incarnation, but also his crucifixion, was “for us”—which, of course, means “for us [humans],” and by implication, it was also for “our salvation.” Again, we are called back to John 6, where Christ speaks of giving his flesh “for the life of the world.” The crucifixion was the event where he did precisely that.
The Creed laconically records that Christ “was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures” This is merely a slight compression of what St. Paul reports in 1 Corinthians 15.3-4, where he himself seems only to be passing on some essential teaching material of the early church: “I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” This records the threefold action of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. It records that the resurrection occurred “the third day,” and that both Christ’s death and his third day resurrection were “according to the scriptures.” It would be beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to document all the possible ways one could see both the death of the Messiah and his resurrection as being “according to the scriptures.” The essential point here is that this was the proclamation of the Apostolic Church, and this proclamation is preserved for us in the writings of St. Paul, and then in the Creed, to be recited by the Church as often as possible. We may note that the Creed records only one “according to the scriptures,” where St. Paul has two, but this, again, is the compressed nature of the Creed, and nothing would prevent one from applying “according to the scriptures” in the Creed not just to the resurrection, but to the entire passage about the death, suffering, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah.
We should also note that in this passage St. Paul says that Christ died “for our sins,” an expression which, though not included in the Creed at this point, serves to reinforce and enrich what the Creed does say. If we combine the words in this passage with those from Matthew 1.21, we can use them to present a version of the Creed which shows how its words and teachings are precisely those of scripture, even if, in order to be of manageable, memorizable size, it must leave some details only implied: “Christ… for us men [“his people”; cf. Mat. 1.21] and for our salvation [“from {our} sins”; cf. Mat. 1.21]…was incarnate…and was crucified also for us [men and for our salvation {from “our sins”; cf. I Cor. 15.3}].” This shows, I hope, that the Creed, in what it says, is following the scriptures—both gospel and epistle—in terms of both language used and thought expressed; and if it could do so even more laboriously, as we have done here, but does not, it refrains from doing so because the Creed is not some boring doctrinal manual, which must be free, like any textbook, to be long and dull in order to be complete. Instead, the Creed is meant to be a very brief summary of the essentials of Christian belief, giving the essence of the faith in a form even a child can learn and say.
After the resurrection, the Creed records four more details about Christ: 1. He “ascended into heaven,” 2. He “sitteth at the right hand of the Father” 3. “and He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” 4. His “kingdom shall have no end.” These words combine a number of images drawn from the scriptures which capture Christ’s role after his resurrection. His ascension to heaven, the completion of his earthly work, is hinted at in John 6.62, as we have seen, and recorded in Acts 1.9-11, with parallel accounts in Mark 16.19 & Luke 24.49-51. His being seated at the right hand of the Father (the hand of honor and authority) is mentioned several times in the scriptures, often so closely associated with the language of ascension that his ascending and sitting seem two parts of a single action—which, in a sense, they are, for the right hand was Jesus’ destiny, and ascension was the means to that end. Mark 16.19 records laconically that Jesus, having ascended, “sat on the right hand of God.” St. Peter mentions these two together in his sermon on Pentecost, when he says of King David, “For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, ‘The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy foes thy footstool’” (Acts 2.34-35; the passage he quotes is the first verse of Psalm 110). Thus, drawing upon both Psalm 68 (which mentions ascension) and Psalm 110, he applies this imagery, not to King David, but to “the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh…Christ” (Acts 2.30), whom he identifies as “Jesus of Nazareth” (2.22).
The Epistle to the Hebrews opens with some very rich imagery which is relevant to the language of the Creed, including Christ’s position of authority. It begins by speaking of “God[’s]…Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds [ages.] Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1.1-3). Passages like this, and like the passages just considered, show us that, far from going beyond the scriptures or replacing their language with needless theological complexities, the Creed actually tones down the rich imagery of scripture, taking from its embarrassment of riches only those images judged necessary to guide us Christians along the paths of right belief.
One of the most moving images of Christ’s exalted position in the cosmos to be found in the scriptures is at the end of St. Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, just before he is stoned. There, we hear, first from the narrator, then from Stephen himself, that he is granted a vision of Christ standing at the right hand of God: “But he [Stephen], being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God’” (Acts 7.55-56). Why is he standing rather than sitting? Perhaps he is standing for Stephen, because Stephen has been standing for him.
Christ’s enthronement on God’s right hand relates to his kingship, his kingdom, and the Creed tells us that this kingdom shall have no end. It should not surprise us that the same passages that speak of Christ’s enthronement often also speak of the eternity of his kingdom. The Psalms speak of both, and the same New Testament books quote Psalms of both sorts. The same opening chapter of Hebrews which contains the powerful imagery we have already seen also quotes Psalm 45.6, “Thy throne, oh God, is for ever and ever,” telling us that this is said “unto the Son” (Heb. 1.8). In verse 13, the writer quotes the same opening verse of Psalm 110 Peter had quoted on Pentecost, about the enthronement of Christ. Likewise, 2 Peter 1.11 speaks of “the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
And so, the Creed instructs us on the ascension, enthronement, and eternal kingdom of Christ, using both the ideas, and often the words, of scripture. But it also must instruct us on one more last thing: his glorious return, and with it, the Last Judgment. The words summarizing this are, like the rest of the Creed, concise, wasting no space; yet they also cleave closely to Biblical language, weaving together the imagery from at least three different passages, two gospels and one epistle. Christ himself describes his glorious return in Matthew 25.31: “When the Son of Man shall come in his glory…then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.” He goes on to describe the judgment as a division of persons, as a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats. The Creed, however, uses the more concise language of 1 Peter 4.5, which speaks of Christ as “him that is ready to judge the quick [living] and the dead.” Finally, we turn to John 14.3, where Christ says to his Apostles, “I go to prepare a place for you [in my Father’s house]. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself.” The Creed beautifully weaves together the language of all three passages to give us this beautiful, concise image of the end: “and He shall come again [John 14.3] in glory [Mat. 25.31] to judge the living and the dead [1 Peter 4.5].” Nothing needful is left out here: Christ’s coming is both a second coming (“come again”) and a coming “in glory.” And this coming has as its purpose “to judge the living and the dead” (which pretty much includes everybody).
Conclusion
And so we see that the article I had read was both right and wrong, because it did not distinguish between doctrinal manuals and the traditional creeds of the ancient church. Doctrinal manuals and elaborate confessions of faith can indeed be long and tedious (the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, is some 45 pages long). No doubt if every group wrote such a document and attempted to bind it upon the faithful, it would make it difficult for them to have that faith as a little child that Jesus requires of us, and unity would seem difficult to achieve with each group writing their own 45-page confession. But the Nicene Creed is different. It is ancient, and available to all who would call themselves Christian. It is brief, focused, and clear. It condenses the essence of what we as Christians believe into a mere 218 English words, recitable at normal speed in 60 seconds, and practically the entire thing, far from being the original composition of the theologians, is plagiarized directly from the best of all possible sources: the Word of God. Anyone who loves the scriptures and the truth they teach should love the Creed, for what it teaches is what they teach, their very words presented in a concentrated form. The Creed is—or should be—no cause for division, but a point where all Christians should unite. The Nicene Creed is a great gift from the ancient church to us, their children. Let us learn it. Let us recite it. Let us unite upon it, as the faithful did of old. Let us truly believe in those the Creed confesses: The Father Almighty; Jesus Christ, the Son; the Holy Spirit, who spoke by the prophets; and the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Christians are so often seeking unity among themselves—the church of my childhood came out of a unity movement, one which said, “No Creed but Christ.” I submit that all of us might do well to look again at the Nicene Creed. If you want a Creed to unite upon, one that is all about Christ, this, I submit, is precisely what you are looking for.
[1] Thus, the English word “priest” (along with the related word “presbyter”) is derived from the Greek title for those church “elders” who officiated in the Christian liturgy. It was only by analogy that it came to be used to refer to all those who officiated in the ceremonies of other religions, whether the Jewish “priests” (Heb. Cohanim) who offered sacrifices in the Tabernacle or Temple, or the priests of various pagan religions.
[2] Anyone intrigued by this idea should consult C.S. Lewis’ Studies in Words, which dedicates an entire chapter to the evolving meaning of the word “world.”
