Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed (2 page)
The Gnostics posited two gods—a stupid and clumsy one who made all material things, including our bodies, and did not do it well and a wise and kindly one who is all spirit and is the source of our spirits currently inhabiting our bodies and who had taken steps to teach our spirits how finally to leave our bodies behind when we die and to make a beeline back to him and happiness. This is Christianity without Christ, a Hamlet-without-the-prince sort of thing. The Creed’s sequence of topics, and some of its phrases, express not only apostolic teaching but also the explicit negation of Gnostic dualism at every point.
Look, now, at the doctrinal ground that the Creed, as syllabus, required catechumens to cover and, at introductory adult level, master.
(1)
The Trinity
. It is true that no explicit three-in-one formulations of the being of God are found in surviving Christian literature until the third and fourth centuries. But it is also true that the reality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit working together as a team for the full salvation of sinners pervades the entire New Testament. It is not too much to say that the gospel, which tells of the Son coming to earth, dying to redeem us, sending the Spirit to us, and finally coming in judgment, all at the Father’s will, cannot be stated at all without speaking in an implicitly trinitarian way. “I believe in God the Father... and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord... and... in the Holy Ghost [Spirit]” gives the Creed a trinitarian shape for all its particular affirmations.
(2)
The creation
. The Creed starts with God as Maker of everything, including ourselves. “The Father Almighty” points to God’s loving care for what he has made, and to his sovereign lordship over all of it. The Gnostics, who did not believe that the God who created is the God who redeems, are already being left behind.
(3)
The Incarnation
. The Son’s course of stepping down, or humiliation (virgin birth, crucifixion, death, and burial), followed by his step-by-step exaltation (resurrection, ascension, heavenly reign, future reign as royal judge), is spelled out in detail, for these facts are, after all, the heart of Christian faith. The virgin birth (which assumes the virginal conception, whereby the Son took flesh and became the God-man) is explicitly affirmed, and so is the reality of the Son’s death. (“He descended into hell [Hades],” the place where all the departed go, is said to make the point that life left his body and he died as really, truly, and completely as you and I must expect in due course to do.) The reason for both these affirmations is not just their scripturalness and cruciality in the Christian story, but also the fact that the Gnostics made a point of denying them both.
The Gnostics negated the Incarnation as a monstrous mistake. They taught that a spirit, called the Christ, sent by the wise God to be our teacher, indwelt Jesus the man from his baptism to his final condemnation but then withdrew, leaving Jesus the man to suffer (or, as some said, to find a substitute for himself, so that he did not die). In any case, the Christ did not die, whatever may have happened to Jesus. Against this Christian teachers insisted from the start that a permanent union of divine and human took place in Mary’s womb, that without diminishing his divinity the Son of God became man, died to rescue us from Satan, sin, and death, and now continues his incarnate life as the enthroned Lord of all and our eternal Savior-Judge.
(4)
The Holy Spirit
. The Pentecostal potentate, if we may reverently call him that, supernaturalizes believers’ lives by both transforming their character into Christlikeness (so Paul and John show) and by shaping their circumstances, and their reactions to their circumstances, for kingdom advance (so Luke in Acts shows). Most of us need to catch up with what the catechumens would have been taught at this point.
(5)
The church
. Created and animated by the Holy Spirit, the church is the community of believers living through God and to God, the Father and the Son, in a sustained pattern of worship, work, and witness. (This is why the church is called “holy,” which means set apart for God.) It is the worldwide people of God and body of Christ, in whose faith and fellowship social, racial, gender, age, educational, professional, and political distinctions cease to count; all are “one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). (This is why the church is called “catholic,” which means comprehensive, or inclusive, in both extent and quality.) Knowing and uniting with the Lord Jesus Christ according to the gospel is the dynamic basis of the church’s inner unity and togetherness. So, no doubt, catechumens were taught, in the days when the Creed was first put together.
(6)
The forgiveness of sins
. In the Creed’s order of instruc-tion, this truth follows the account of the Holy Spirit, clearly because it is the Holy Spirit who makes us realize that sin, in its habits, acts, and guilt, is our problem and that until we get rid of its guilt we cannot have fellowship with God. Then the Spirit makes us realize that forgiveness, secured for us through Christ’s atoning death, is God’s free gift to us, which we receive through penitent faith (credence, consent, com-mitment) exercised toward Christ himself, the risen Lord. The gift is renewable; it is there to be received again and again, as often as we need it (which is, in fact, daily). And forgiveness of forsaken sins opens the door, every time, to new fellowship with our heavenly Father and with Jesus himself as our master and friend.
(7)
The Christian hope
. Gnostics anticipated disembodiment, but Christians look forward to being re-embodied, on the model of Jesus’ resurrection, bodily ascension, and glorification. In the unending, unaging life with Jesus into which we shall enter, God’s threefold purpose for bodies—namely, experience, enjoyment, and expression—will be fulfilled as never before.
Now I ask again: can you find the gospel in the Creed? And can you see that there is nothing in the Creed that is not part of the gospel, when fully stated? Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire. The ABC approach is thus not full enough; the whole story of the Father’s Christ-exalting plan of redeeming love, from eternity to eternity, must be told, or the radical reorientation of life for which the gospel calls will not be understood, and the required total shift from man-centeredness to God-centeredness, and more specifically from self-centeredness to Christ-centeredness, will not take place. All that the Creed covers needs to be grasped and taught, as an integral part of the message of the saving love of God. To help in this is the purpose of the present book.
And without faith it is impossible to please him,
for whoever would draw near to God
must believe that he exists and that he rewards
those who seek him.
HEBREWS 1 1: 6
I Believe in God
W
hen people are asked what they believe in, they give not merely different answers, but different sorts of answers. Someone might say, “I believe in UFOs”—that means, “I think UFOs are real.” “I believe in democracy”—that means, “I think democratic principles are just and beneficial.” But what does it mean when Christian congregations stand and say, “I believe in God”? Far more than when the object of belief is UFOs or democracy.
I can believe in UFOs without ever looking for one and in democracy without ever voting. In cases like these, belief is a matter of the intellect only. But the Creed’s opening words, “I believe in God,” render a Greek phrase coined by the writers of the New Testament, meaning literally: “I
am
believing into
God.” That is to say, over and above believing certain truths
about
God, I am living in a relation of commitment
to
God in trust and union. When I say “I believe in God,” I am professing my conviction that God has invited me to this commitment and declaring that I have accepted his invitation.
F
AITH
The word
faith
, which is English for a Greek noun (
pistis
) formed from the verb in the phrase “believe into” (
pisteuo
), gets the idea of trustful commitment and reliance better than
belief
does. Whereas
belief
suggests bare opinion,
faith
, whether in a car, a patent medicine, a protégé, a doctor, a marriage partner, or what have you, is a matter of treating the person or thing as trustworthy and committing yourself accordingly. The same is true of faith in God, and in a more far-reaching way.
It is the offer and demand of the object that determines in each case what a faith-commitment involves. Thus, I show faith in my car by relying on it to get me places, and in my doctor by submitting to his treatment. And I show faith in God by bowing to his claim to rule and manage me; by receiving Jesus Christ, his Son, as my own Lord and Savior; and by relying on his promise to bless me here and hereafter. This is the meaning of response to the offer and demand of the God of the Creed.
Christian faith only begins when we attend to
God’s self-disclosure in Christ and in Scripture,
where we meet him as the Creator who
“commands all people everywhere to repent”
and to “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ.”
Sometimes faith is equated with that awareness of “one above” (or “beyond” or “at the heart of things”) that from time to time, through the impact of nature, conscience, great art, being in love, or whatever, touches the hearts of the hardest-boiled. (Whether they take it seriously is another question, but it comes to all—God sees to that.) But Christian faith only begins when we attend to God’s self-disclosure in Christ and in Scripture, where we meet him as the Creator who “commands all people everywhere to repent” and to “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ . . . as he has commanded us” (Acts 17:30; 1 John 3:23; cf. John 6:28ff.). Christian faith means hearing, noting, and doing what God says.
D
OUBT
I write as if God’s revelation in the Bible has self-evident truth and authority, and I think that in the last analysis it has; but I know, as you do, that uncriticized preconceptions and prejudices create problems for us all, and many have deep doubts and perplexities about elements of the biblical message. How do these doubts relate to faith?
Well, what is doubt? It is a state of divided mind—”double-mindedness” is James’s concept (James 1:6-;8)—and it is found both
within
faith and
without
it. In the former case, it is faith infected, sick, and out of sorts; in the latter, it belongs to a struggle either toward faith or away from a God felt to be invading and making claims one does not want to meet. In C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography
Surprised by Joy
, you can observe both these motivations successively.
In our doubts, we think we are honest, and certainly try to be; but perfect honesty is beyond us in this world, and an unacknowledged unwillingness to take God’s word about things, whether from deference to supposed scholarship or fear of ridicule or of deep involvement or some other motive, often underlies a person’s doubt about this or that item of faith. Repeatedly this becomes clear in retrospect, though we could not see it at the time.
How can one help doubters? First, by
explaining
the problem area (for doubts often arise from misunderstanding); second, by
exhibiting
the reasonableness of Christian belief at that point, and the grounds for embracing it (for Christian beliefs, though above reason, are not against it); third, by
exploring
what prompts the doubts (for doubts are never rationally compelling, and hesitations about Christianity usually have more to do with likes and dislikes, hurt feelings, and social, intellectual, and cultural snobbery than the doubters are aware).
P
ERSONAL
In worship, the Creed is said in unison, but the opening words are “I believe”—not “we”: each worshiper speaks for himself. Thus he proclaims his philosophy of life and at the same time testifies to his happiness: he has come into the hands of the Christian God where he is glad to be, and when he says, “I believe,” it is an act of praise and thanksgiving on his part. It is in truth a great thing to be able to say the Creed.
F
URTHER
B
IBLE
S
TUDY
Faith in action:
Romans 4