“As the Lord’s Prayer is the Prayer of prayers, the Decalogue the Law of laws, so the Apostles’ Creed is the Creed of creeds. It contains all the fundamental articles of the Christian faith necessary to salvation, in the form of facts, in simple Scripture language, and in the most natural order — the order of revelation — from God and the creation down to the resurrection and life everlasting... It is by far the best popular summary of the Christian faith ever made in so brief a space. It still surpasses all later symbols for catechetical and liturgical purposes, especially as a profession of candidates for baptism and church membership... It has the fragrance of antiquity and the inestimable weight of universal consent. It is a bond of union between all ages and sections of Christendom.” —Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 1:14-15
The Creed
Introduction: The Nature and Importance of Creeds
A creed is both a rule of faith and a confession of faith. In the first instance, it sets forth what ought to be believed; in the second, it expresses what in fact we do believe. Thus, a creed is both a brief summary of the fundamental teachings of Scripture and a personal confession of our own religious convictions. A creed marks out: It marks out the great truths that the Church believes the Bible reveals and requires, and it marks out as Christians those who profess it.
This dual function makes creeds both desirable and necessary. Creeds are desirable in that they summarize in handy form and brief compass that complex collection of historical narratives, poems, aphorisms, prophecies, sermons, letters, visions, and parables we call the Bible. In this capacity, the creed is simply a brief compendium of the church’s understanding of Scripture. The creed says, in effect, “This is how the Church interprets the Bible.” As John Cassian explained so well in the early fifth century, “all those matters which are spread over the whole body of the sacred writings with immense fullness of detail, were collected together in sum in the matchless brevity of the Creed” (Cassian, The Seven Books of John Cassian, 592). Creeds are necessary because Christian faith, like most strong human convictions, demands an outlet, or an utterance. Faith and confession seem intimately and inextricably connected. Where there is faith, there is confession of faith. In short, creeds are a valuable means by which we can profess the faith we possess and make it known to others, both in the Church for purposes of worship and edification, and in the marketplace for purposes of evangelism and influence.
Furthermore, creeds are necessary because God is known and served by the mind as much as by the heart. In that regard, creeds help us better to understand and to relate to the God who is truth itself. Theologians as widely diverse as Karl Barth and Justin Martyr have noted that Christians, because they are possessed of intelligence, are required to discern with all possible clarity what can be known about God. Seen in this light, articulation of our faith in accurate and intelligible words is part of the mind’s service to God, and as such it is an indispensable tool in better performing all the other services we can render Him.
One easily sees, then, that creeds presuppose both the Bible and personal faith. That is, creeds presuppose the Scriptures as the repository of theological truth, on the one hand, and they presuppose our own commitment to that truth, on the other.
In their dual function as summaries of doctrine and confessions of personal belief, creeds (or at least the theological components that comprise them) are not only based upon the Bible, they are found within it. Ancient Israel, like modern Christianity, had its historical credos and its declaratory affirmations of faith. In Deuteronomy 26:1-11, for example, faithful Hebrews were instructed to bring their offerings to the priest and to declare their gratitude to God by publicly rehearsing a litany of the great things the Lord had done for them and their ancestors.
Indicative of how the Jews were raised up to reassert the truth of monotheism, Deuteronomy 4:39 declares: “To you it [i.e., God’s awesome display of power] was revealed so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.” As Deuteronomy 6:4 simply and memorably affirms: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord,” a notion repeatedly echoed in the New Testament. Jesus quotes it in his reply to the enquiring scribe (Mark 12:29), and he refers to it again in his so-called high-priestly prayer (John 17:11). The apostle Paul also reaffirms characteristic Jewish monotheism on several occasions (1 Cor. 8:4, Gal. 3:20, 1 Tim. 2:5).
But the New Testament does more than reaffirm the monotheism of the Old. Its own bedrock affirmation is that Jesus is Lord, Messiah, and Savior. This three-sided affirmation is a distinctive note in Christian teaching, and the Bible sounds it repeatedly. John the Baptist, for example, begins his confession of faith by identifying Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and finishes it by declaring: “I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God” (John 1:34). Not many lines later, Nathanael follows suit by saying to Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49). While not themselves creeds, such affirmations are the stuff of which Christian creeds are made.
The apostle Peter makes at least two such memorable confessions. In the first, he says to Christ: “You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68, 69). In the second, Peter declares to Him: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), an affirmation Jesus identifies as the foundation upon which He will build his Church, and against which the gates of Hell itself cannot prevail (Matt. 16:18).
In the shadow of her brother’s recent death, and in response to Jesus’ question whether or not she believed that He Himself was the resurrection and the life, Martha replied: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world” (John 11:27). Her reply embraces three important points found in so many subsequent Christian creeds: our Lord is (1) the Messiah predicted by the prophets, (2) the Son of God, and (3) the One who is the object of our expectation and hope.
One final confession of note in the gospels is Thomas’ dramatic address to Christ as “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), which, in the wake of Thomas’s prior disinclination to believe, recognizes Christ’s divinity and expresses Thomas’ own personal appropriation and affirmation of that fact.
Though not a confession of belief as such, Christ’s command to his followers to make disciples in every nation and to baptize them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19) contains the same tripartite formula so common in later Christian creeds, and to which the churches give virtually universal consent. In fact, most creeds, the Apostles’ Creed included, are expansions upon the Church’s belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in what they have done (and continue to do) on our behalf.
The New Testament epistles are also replete with personal confessions of faith and/or statements that were later to become prominent creedal themes. In his first letter to the Corinthians, for example, Paul makes at least two such declarations: (1) “[F]or us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6); and (2) “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). Regarding such affirmations, Paul encourages his readers “to stand firm” and to “hold fast to the traditions which [they] were taught” (2 Thess. 2:15). Among such traditions, the first letter to Timothy makes perhaps the New Testament's most comprehensive pronouncement concerning Christ: “He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Tim. 3:16). Affirmations like these are called “the pattern of doctrine” (Rom. 6:17) and the “model of sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13), and they, or their close relatives, are found in nearly every creed of note.
Similarly, the epistle to the Hebrews frequently mentions “the confession,” which its readers are exhorted to “consider,” and to “hold fast” “without wavering” (Heb. 3:1; 4:14; 10:23). The epistle of Jude appeals to its readers “to contend for the faith which was once delivered to all the saints” (Jude 3).
Such confessions seem to have been considered a Christian’s duty, on the one hand, and salvific, on the other: “Whoever shall confess me before men,” Jesus said, “him I will confess before my Father in Heaven” (Matt 10:32). Or, as Paul noted, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, because with the heart man believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made to salvation” (Rom. 10:9, 10). “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God,” says the first Johannine epistle, “God abides in him, and he in God” (1 John 4:15).
Thus, whether one thinks of the creed as the Bible distilled or as the Bible expanded, the creed is, at its core, biblical. The apostolic church was, from the very beginning, a believing and confessing church.
The proto-creedal apostolic affirmations of the Bible were followed in time by the more elaborately articulated creeds and confessions of the Church fathers and of the early churches. Though these creeds and confessions display some variety in form and difference in language, from the earliest times they are theologically very similar. As we shall see, they also contain most of the salient features of the Apostles’ Creed, our focus of study.
Because of the different uses to which these affirmations were put, they tend to divide themselves into two categories: interrogative, used primarily for the instruction of catechumens studying for baptism; and declarative, used primarily by church members during worship as public statements of belief. Of the first sort, one of the best and briefest examples is that employed by the church at Carthage (c. 250 A. D.), to which the much later Sacramentary of Gelasius (c. 500 A. D.) is very similar:
Priest: Do you believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth?
Catechumen: I believe [Latin: Credo].
Priest: Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son?
Catechumen: I believe.
Priest: Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and life everlasting?
Catechumen: I believe. (Maclear, An Introduction to the Creeds, 12-13)
The interrogatory creed of Hippolytus (c. 215 A. D.) is even more like the Apostles’ Creed than is that of Carthage:
Do you believe in God the Father All Governing?
Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, Who was begotten by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and died (and was buried) and rose the third day living from the dead, and ascended into the heavens, and sat down on the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?
Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, in the holy Church, and (in the resurrection of the body)? (Leith, Creeds of the Churches, 23)
Creeds like those cited or mentioned above were taught to candidates for baptism in the ancient church before they could be accepted as full members. Such creeds took the form of a three part dialogue between priest and candidate. As taught to the prospective member, these creeds were known as the traditio symboli, or “given sign.” That is why Augustine begins his sermon to the catechumens on the creed with the words, “Receive, my children, the Rule of Faith” (Augustine, “On the Creed” 370). When repeated back to the priest at baptism by the candidate, they were known as the redditio symboli, or “returned sign.” The candidate was submerged in (or else was submitted to) the waters of baptism after each of the three required responses. Such practices help us to see why the creed was called a “symbol,” by which was not meant “that which represents something else” (as the word is commonly used today), but “password,” or “shibboleth,” that word by which one gained access or admission to some place or to some society from which one was excluded without it. In order to be most serviceable, of course, passwords are kept conveniently brief. Concerning the convenient brevity of the Apostles’ Creed I will address myself shortly.
Of the second sort of creed — the declarative — two of the earliest and best examples are those recorded in the writings of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons (c. 180 A. D.), and Tertullian, the apologist (c. 200 A. D.). According to Irenaeus, the Christian churches everywhere believe
in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, by means of Christ Jesus, the Son of God; who because of His surpassing love towards His creation, condescended to be born of the virgin, He Himself uniting man through Himself to God, and having suffered under Pontius Pilate, and rising again, and having been received up in splendour, shall come in glory, the Saviour of those who are saved, and the Judge of those who are judged. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 417)
According to Tertullian’s slightly more brief version, which even more closely resembles the Apostles’ Creed than does Irenaeus’,
The rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one, alone immoveable and irreformable; the rule, to wit, of believing in one only God omnipotent, the Creator of the universe, and His Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised again the third day from the dead, received in the heavens, sitting now at the right (hand) of the Father, destined to come to judge quick and dead through the resurrection of the flesh. (Tertullian, On the Veiling of Virgins, 27)
“This law of faith,” Tertullian continues, is “constant” (ibid.).
The Apostles’ Creed, as we have it, is anonymous. We now know that the ancient tradition asserting that the Apostles’ Creed was so named because, in solemn assembly, each of the twelve apostles contributed to it one of its twelve articles before they left Jerusalem on their various missionary journeys, is a pious fiction (Rufinus, A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, 542. See, Appendix I). Though in its main outline and standard expression one can trace the Apostles’ Creed perhaps as far back as about 180 A. D. in the church at Rome to a version known as the Forma Romana Vetus, or Old Roman Form (See Appendix II), some of its articles did not appear until centuries afterward. The article affirming Christ’s descent into Hell, for example, entered the creed only in about 400 A.D.; that concerning the communion of saints did not appear until some 150 years later. In fact, this creed was not even called the Apostles’ Creed until the late fourth or early fifth century. If considered as a whole, therefore, the full text of the Apostles’ Creed (called the Textus Receptus, or received text), as we now have it, cannot be traced back much before 700 A.D.
But considered as to its substance, however, the Apostles’ Creed dates from the earliest times. As even the few biblical and extra-biblical affirmations cited above attest, the most significant pronouncements in the Apostles’ Creed were widely current almost from the beginning. It is an accurate echo of the faith of the ancient church. By studying and by committing ourselves to the beliefs articulated in the Apostles’ Creed, therefore, we link our faith with that of the apostles and of the church they established.
As we noted above, the Apostles’ Creed (like nearly all widely used creeds) is an expansion of the trinitarian baptismal formula given in the gospls, which expressly mentions Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19), which, from the beginning, suggested a triple division to the creed, which some perceptively labelled creation, redemption, and sanctification respectively.
The various creeds build upon this tripartite structure in different ways. The Apostle’s Creed does so with simplicity and restraint. It records its theological and historical affirmations in a brief and practical fashion. Unlike the Nicene Creed, it does not descend into a long litany of semi-metaphysical particulars. For example, whereas the Apostles’ Creed begins its affirmations concerning the Son with Christ’s conception and nativity, and proceeds from there directly to his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, the Nicene Creed begins by expounding and expanding upon Christ’s nature and his person, and it does so by beginning (as does John’s gospel) not only before Christ’s incarnation, but before even time itself. The Nicene Creed affirms that the Son was (1) “begotten of the Father before all worlds,” (2) “God of God,” (3) “Light of Light,” (4) “true God of true God,” (5) “begotten not made,” (6) “of one substance with the Father,” and (7) the One “through whom all things were made.” Only then does it turn to the simple, historical facts noted in the Apostles’ Creed. While historical exigencies made these and similar additions adviseable in order to exclude serious theological error, these additions are not an unmitigated or unsullied blessing. In Westcott’s words, when “false teaching has made such addition necessary, as in the Nicene Creed, the addition is, under some aspects, a loss. It is at best a safeguard against error, and not, as we are tempted to think, an increase of spiritual knowledge” (Westcott, The Historic Faith, 26).
The Nicene Creed further demonstrates its tendency toward more fulsome expression by adding to its affirmation about Christ’s incarnation and passion the explanation that such things were done “for us men and for our salvation.” To its article on Christ’s resurrection it adds the Pauline phrase quoted earlier that this event occurred “in accordance with the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:4). To its affirmation concerning Christ’s return it adds the notion that of his kingdom “there shall be no end.”
Unlike the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed is expansive also in its treatment of the Holy Spirit. Whereas the Apostles’ Creed is content simply to express belief in the Holy Spirit, the Nicene Creed affirms Him (1) to be “the Lord,” (2) to be the “Giver of life,” (3) to “proceed from the Father,” (4) to be “worshipped and glorified” along “with the Father and Son,” and (5) to have spoken “through the prophets.”
While in its concluding articles the Apostles’ Creed affirms simple belief in “the forgiveness of sins,” the Nicene Creed goes on to connect this forgiveness to baptism. Whereas the Apostles’ Creed proclaims belief in “the resurrection of the body,” the Nicene Creed affirms also that we anticipate “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
Perhaps an illustration will serve. The first time I travelled in Switzerland I did so on a bicycle. I knew before I ever saw the Alps that Alpine travel by bicycle would be both rewarding and demanding. I tried to pack my gear accordingly. I did not want to drag over the towering mountain passes of Switzerland several pounds of equipment that I would never use. I wanted no more than I needed. Unnecessary baggage is a burden, not a blessing.
The Apostles’ Creed functions on much the same principle: what is not required is not included. Unlike the copious, almost luxuriant, articulations of the Nicene, Chalcedonian, or Athanasian Creeds, the Apostles’ Creed carries no more theological baggage than is strictly necessary. It concerns itself more with history and soteriology than with ontology. Brief, handy, and practical, the Apostles' Creed avoids enshrining the technical jargon that reflects and clarifies the bitter ecclesiastical quarrels of another age. It uses instead the unadorned yet graphic language of affirmation and event. As Joseph Ratzinger observes, the Apostle’s Creed is “concerned with the history of salvation...it simply accepts the fact that to save us God became man; it does not seek to penetrate beyond this story to its causes and to its connection with the totality of being” (Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 52)
In short, the Apostles’ Creed has the great virtue of being simple and brief. With admirable restraint it declines to pile explanation upon explanation, or mystery upon mystery. Because it does, it is exactly as Alister McGrath once described it: “the finest creed of all...because it is fully developable into a theology; because it is simple while yet containing the main outlines of Christian belief; and because it is easily memorizable, which makes it ideal for teaching and for learning” (Bauman, Roundtable, 121).
We study this remarkable creed not only because its comprehensive brevity makes it suitable for teaching and for learning, but because, as Hugh Burnaby explains,
The Christian revelation did not take the form of a system of doctrine, but of a human life [i. e., the life of Christ]; and what we find in the Creed is a statement of how the Church interpreted the significance of that life. Such an interpretation was essential. But its purpose was to sustain that faith in God; and the statements of the Creed have been found, in centuries of Christian experience, to do that. (Burnaby, Thinking Through the Creed, 14)
But creeds do more than sustain Christian faith; they arise from it. Creeds are not, indeed cannot be, imposed by simple ecclesiastical fiat. Instead, rather like scientific definitions in other branches of knowledge, creeds typically undergo what might roughly be described as a four-stage development: observation, reflection, articulation, and testing. In the first stage, Christian thinkers examine carefully the text of Scripture and the course of their own and others’ experience of living in agreement with Scripture, at least as they understand it. Second, they begin to reflect deeply and carefully upon what they have seen, in order to grasp its true significance. Because they cannot be content with an inarticulate devotion, to this perceived significance and to their conclusions concerning it, they naturally try to give thoughtful and precise expression. Their newly formulated insights are then submitted to testing in the twin crucibles of life and thought to see if those insights can withstand the rough and tumble of genuine human experience and the rigors of systematic intellectual scrutiny. In this informal but effective way, the church has invested decades, even centuries, in capturing in precise creedal form the tremendous truths revealed in the historical facts connected with Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, this is not to say that creeds have nothing to do with the pronouncements of bishops and councils; they certainly do. But creeds typically find their roots elsewhere, in the life and thought of the Church. This is especially true of the Apostles’ Creed, every line of which has been tested by long experience and careful, repeated reflection upon that experience in the light of Scripture.
Furthermore, because the Apostles’ Creed has grown out of centuries of human experience and reflection, for that very reason it continues to be both relevant and reliable. It continues to ring true because, like all good theology, it is deeply rooted in divine revelation, on the one hand, and human reality, on the other.
Though centuries in the making, the Apostles’ Creed grew up in a world of thought quite different from our own. Unlike the creed, in our better moments, we now no longer think of Hell as a place below us, a place to where someone might (in the words of the creed) “descend” in any fashion other than metaphorically. By the same token, we no longer think of Heaven as above us. After all, up from London is down from Melbourne. The Apostles’ Creed is subject to what E. L. Mascall described as the inevitable limitations of all verbal formulae, however august and solemn they might be.
Nevertheless, the faith we proclaim when we recite the Apostles’ Creed is not a faith reduced to, or tied to, one particular era, or to one particular form of expression. As Cardinal Bellarmine long ago pointed out, correct faith is not a matter of one special set of words only, but of correct and true meaning, a meaning able to be articulated in many ways. Therefore, we shall concern ourselves here not so much with the ipsissima verba, the very words, of the creed as with their meaning and with the perennial truths which those words communicate. Those perennial truths, and the best way to conceive them and to express them, shall continually be our concern throughout these pages. The ancient and medieval forms of expression preserved for us in the Apostles’ Creed will be our guide in this endeavor, not our master.
It is no failing of the creed that this should be so, for it is the fate of all human expression to be (to some extent) conditioned both by time and place. That is why the Bible has never been translated or commented upon for the last time, and that is why we concern ourselves here once again with the Apostles’ Creed, the subject of explanation and comment by Christian writers as far back as Ambrose, Augustine and Rufinus, on the one hand, and by writers as modern as Barth and Brunner, on the other. To make the old creed new again is, contrary to appearances, the conservative approach. As G. K. Chesterton once observed, the surest way to make a white post black is to leave it alone. That we shall not do.
But this we must: study, contemplate, and comprehend. As Walther von Loewenich wisely discerned, “Only one thing will avail: the laborious, patient education of theologian and layman in the correct and honest understanding of the truth of Scripture in obedience and freedom” (Rein, A New Look at the Apostles’ Creed, 13).
To that beneficial and interesting task we now turn.
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"The rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one, alone immoveable and irreformable; the rule, to wit, of believing in one only God omnipotent, the Creator of the universe, and His Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised again the third day from the dead, received in the heavens, sitting now at the right (hand) of the Father, destined to come to judge quick and dead through the resurrection of the flesh."
—Tertullian, On the Veiling of Virgins
date modified:
6 July 2006
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