Monday 5/2

The Tradition of our Faith
A Study of the Apostles’ Creed



It is difficult to believe what you cannot understand or, at least, what has not been articulated to you by a trusted source.  But, even among those people who “believe”, not all believe on the same level.  For instance, the same Bible passage in the hands of a priest in the Episcopal Church in Northern Virginia, a preacher of an independent charismatic congregation in Kentucky, and a snake handling Bible thumper in a West Virginia “holler” will not elicit the same sermon nor will the result of one appeal to either of the others.  This is just a fancy way of saying that we do not all believe the same thing, even though we read the same Bible.

In a nutshell, this is the problem that faced the early Christian Church.  For some three decades following the death and resurrection of Jesus, the church remained essentially in Jerusalem, primarily meeting in ante rooms of the Temple or in homes of its members.  Then came the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Romans in 70 AD.  Whatever tenuous  string that might have bound the Christians to the Temple was broken.  This was both a bad thing and a good thing. It was bad that the Jews lost their Temple, never to be rebuilt. It was good that the Christians were no longer at risk to become a small and inconsequential sect of Judaism.  It forced them out on their own, eventually into all of Asia Minor and the parts of Europe in the Roman Empire.

Now, at this point we have to realize that the scripture of the early Christian Church was the Old Testament.  They viewed their new belief as a natural progression of the Old Testament story of the mighty acts of God.  God was simply continuing to move in a manner to save all his people.  Remember, for the disciples and the apostles, the OT was the only scripture they had ever had.

Now, here’s an important concept.  From the time of the Exile (when the people were carried off into Babylon and finally returned some 50 years later, to the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, Judaism was essentially a combination of “denominations” held together by ritual at the Temple. There were Scribes and Sadducees and Pharisees, each of them practicing their beliefs in somewhat different ways, much as Baptists and Presbyterians affirm essentially the same theology but with differences.  In the OT times, this led to the creation of a second volume of the Bible – the Mishnah, a collection of legal and moral precepts by which Jewish life is to be lived. The Christians added a second volume, too:  it was the New Testament.  It began as a collection, primarily oral, by which the community expressed its belief by what it had heard from disciples and church teachers.  The congregations established by Paul, for example, had only the OT and Paul’s teachings as its gospel.  And the Law became the problem.  People asked, “Why not eat shrimp?”  “Why do we have to be circumcised?’  Paul pled to the church fathers that Christians did not have to enter the church by going through Judaism, that Jesus Christ was a new covenant not bound by the old covenant. So, there was a seed planted that could lead to dissension.

Now pause for a moment and consider what could have occasioned these varied opinions.  A great deal of time had passed since the disciples were available to correct misinterpretations.  Notice that the Apostle Paul spent much space in his letters to the congregations that he formed, simply to correct rising disagreements or even heresies at Corinth and Ephesus and Colossae.  There were literally hundreds of “gospels” floating around the church, each purporting to have been authored by a disciples or a leader in the First Century Church.  There was a writing attributed to Mary Magdalene, another to Mary the mother of Jesus, one supposedly written by Judas, another by Barabbas, several had the name of Joseph of Arimathea and so on.  These were distributed, much as Paul’s letters were, to various congregations.  From 140 AD to 367 AD various leaders of the church – those whom we call the Early Church Fathers – attempted to determine exactly which of these letters and gospels reflected the actual teachings of Jesus as those teachings were defined by the eleven disciples.

The most elemental form of the creed probably came into being in the year 200 when Saint Hippolytus wrote to suggest words he thought might be appropriate to be spoken by new converts at their baptism.  The candidate was to make an affirmative answer to three questions.  He wrote,

        And when he who is to be baptized goes down into
        the water, let he who baptizes lay his hands upon him
        and say, “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?”
        and he who is baptized shall say, “I believe.”

Then followed two more questions, reflecting belief in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit; each was to occasion an affirmative answer.  At this point, the questions were not considered to be a creed, a repository of belief.  The statements were considered to be a symbol of the faith.
Almost immediately, there arose a problem:  the phrase that Hippolytus used, “God the Father Almighty”, does not appear anywhere in scripture.  However, each of the elements of that phrase – Father and Almighty – do appear in both the Old and the New Testament.  And this brings up a necessary point to consider:  the theology of the creeds was not created by the early church;  the theology was present in both the Old and New Testaments already - it was simply refined  into brief statements.

 

There were creeds (or faith statements) in the Old Testament, incorporating the Hebrew belief that found its basis in “the mighty acts of God” – that is, God revealing himself through his intervention in history.  So we encounter, in the Book of Leviticus, a creed like statement, a formula spoken each time a man brings his first fruits of the harvest to be presented as an offering at the Temple.  As he approaches the altar, he says…

 

         A wandering Aramean was my father, and he
         went down into Egypt to sojourn there, few in
         number…and the Egyptians treated them harshly
         and inflicted us and laid upon us hard bondage
      …and the Lord brought us up out of Egypt with
      a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…
      and brought us to this place and gave us land.

 

Faith statements in the Old Testament always spoke of what God had done, was doing, or has promised to do – as is indicated by the name by which God revealed himself to Moses;  I Am (a literal translation of which is “I am what I have done, what I am doing, and what I will accomplish.”)  The Hebrew verb incorporates all three tenses to make this translation possible.

In the New Testament, faith statements reflect the same mighty acts of God.  For instance, in the Book of Hebrews, the unknown author writes,

        “…in former times God revealed himself through the
        Prophets, but in these later days he has chosen
         to reveal himself  through his son Jesus Christ.”

 

So in the New Testament, God reveals himself in the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus – events which are rooted in a certain time in history – a time, for instance, we read, when Pilate was procurator of Jerusalem.

Now these faith statements formed the basis of the various creeds that the Church has produced – words that reach back into the Old Testament and reflect the scriptures that were being accepted also in the New Testament.

But why did the Church feel the need to create Creeds?

 

If we think of the faith of the church as a mighty river washing down through history, it soon becomes obvious that the river might occasionally run wild, flood and wash over its banks.  The floods occur when divergent thoughts arose in the Church.  Some solution had to be considered before the Church splintered over these disagreements of thought.

We will rush over the persecutions that arose against the Church in sundry parts of the Empire, and the serious persecution that, for a while, forced the Church underground (literally). Then, at the beginning of the Third Century, when Constantine the Great became a Caesar, he was influenced to make Christianity the “official” religion.  He baptized his army, immersing them, with the exception of their right arm which was pledged to him.  He himself, on his deathbed, was baptized.  Under Constantine, the church flourished, for the world knew peace; all should have been well for the Church.

There were no outside enemies.  However, the Church divided itself into geographical areas for the sake of government, each region elected a bishop, “the lords of the church”. The areas were somewhat the same as the major metropolitan areas of the Empire.  Rome had a bishop, Alexandria had a bishop, as did Constantinople, Athens, and Ephesus.  It soon became apparent that all bishops did not think alike, and some of them offered rather exotic interpretations of the faith. There arose sundry “heresies” – “an opinion contrary to the generally accepted truth”.

In his wisdom,  Constantine sent out an invitation to the major leaders of the Church – its Bishops and theologians – to meet in Council at a place called Nicea, in the year 325. The specific problem had been occasioned by a man named Arius who was teaching that Jesus was not of the “same essence” as God, and was, in fact, inferior to God.  Arius felt that to make Jesus of the same essence was to make Jesus an additional God, and – he insisted – there could be only one God!  The Council fell back upon Scripture, namely Philippians 2, to declare Jesus’ equality with God. This decree elevated Christianity above the polytheistic sects of the Empire and also set the pattern that all faith statements must be based on Scripture and reasonable interpretation of what the Apostles’ taught. It gave birth to the Nicene Creed.

 

So, here we are in the Fourth Century, more than three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and – for the most part – the death of the disciples.  The diversity of thought by the sundry teachers of the faith led to the need of a formalized statement, a creed, to which all could give assent.  Such a creed would be expected to reflect what the Apostles' taught, based on their own experience with Jesus, realize the tensions that arose:

And, during all of this time, sundry heresies were born by various
scholars.  The most threatening of these were the ones lumped
together as “the Gnostics”, the people who claimed special knowledge given by sundry spirits, and often based on nothing more than their own bad experience.

So, let’s return to that earlier statement that the world was essentially at peace and the church had no outside enemies.  That is not exactly true because there were many pseudo-religions popping up all over the place, and many of them claiming to represent the true God and Jesus Christ.  The Creeds were produced not to sharpen or elaborate on the faith, but to defend the faith.

Let’s look at several examples, aberrations of the Christian beliefs.

    Around the year two hundred – some century and a half since
    the church had its beginnings, and a hundred years after even
    the eldest of the disciples were alive to defend – two major
    forces were arrayed against the church – Gnosticism and
    Marcionism.

 

Now, Gnosticism (the Greek word meaning “knowledge”) was not a single structured group of people, but many different small groups, each offering a different variation of belief, too varied to be associated with the others.  Church history does not define the beliefs, but speaks against the groups, so we know little about how they might express their heresies – only that
they were indeed heresies.  Essentially, however, we know that these groups held the belief that salvation could be attained through study of the teachings of Jesus.  However, they taught that not all of the teachings of Jesus had been written down;  some had been passed by oral tradition and had been revealed only to them.  And, some said that other teachings had been recently revealed by a spirit speaking only to them.

 

The Marcions, who were responsible for the first widespread heresy in the Church, had obscured the Christian faith by an attempt to merge it with their brand of Judaism.  They said that the Old Testament God was completely evil and had created an evil world.  The Jews, they said, had failed to reconcile the mercy and the judgment of God. Marcion rejected the image of God as Father, perhaps because he had a terrible relationship with his own abusive father.  He said that Jesus was not human but was a phantom, and therefore was immune to the pain, suffering and temptations of the world.

 

We see these people reflected in the Apostles’ creed by the phrase,
“…his only son, who was crucified, dead and buried.” (all human
attributes).  The Marcionites were doomed to extinction by their
insistence on celibacy;  they forbade sexual union between members of their sect.  Growth then was only by conversion, not heredity. (In this belief, they are reflected by the Shaker community in 18th Century New England, who made fine furniture but had a brief  heritage.)

 

Now, originally, all that was required of membership in the Church was “repentance, the affirmation that Jesus was Lord, baptism, and the acceptance of the Holy Spirit.” 1 Then, the Creed expanded to meet the challenges of sundry heretical forces.  Starting with a simple three part statement at baptism in the Roman Church (in 200 AD) the Creed evolved into a rather complex statement of essential faith.  This poses a question:  Do we have to believe in the Creed to be a Christian?

 

How did the Creed come about?  One of the great theories, by an early Christian leader named Rufinus of Aquileia,  is that when the disciples were called to Galilee to receive the Great Commission provided by Jesus (Matthew 28:16-20) they were directed to create the Creed.  Then, at Pentecost they were given the gift of language to accomplish this task.  Each disciple was to suggest one phrase, and together these phrases formed the Creed. I hesitate to mention that this theory received no substantive support and is obvious only in stuff and legend.  The truth of the matter is that each part of the Creed reflects what the early disciples taught, as far as could be remembered and written.  In addition, each phrase had to stand the test of being compared to Biblical texts.  How could anybody be sure it was indeed the “apostles’ creed”?   The writings of the Early Church Father’s – those men who were elevated to leadership in the first three centuries after Christ – were the basis for interpretation.  And they wrote a great deal!  It will be our task to ferret out the essential meaning that has been layered on these writing in the later generations.  And this is important:  each generation had its heretics, many of them reputed scholars, who insisted that the earlier writings were incorrect.  And, it seems, each generation also had its fads, just as we see today.  Who is correct:  the people who picket every military funeral and spout their homophobic rhetoric, the multi-thousand member congregation’s who insist “God wants everybody to be rich”, the main-line churches who are struggling to hang on,  the “Jesus movement” who are denying, by rational proof, the resurrection of Jesus and the multitude of other miracles, or the European churches who are closing their doors and saying that Christ is irrelevant to the modern world?  It is well to pause here and remember that the Creed is a theological statement, and that “theology” is “human thought about God”, and human thought is sometimes less than divine wisdom!

Now let’s move to the sundry articles of faith that we pronounce as the tradition of our belief.  Gerald Kennedy, a Methodist bishop, tells the marvelous story of a hound down in Kentucky who had been taught to chase and corner the fox.  And he was good at it. He could pick up a scent with the best of them, and trail a fox better than any. And when he caught sight of the furry tail, he could really turn on the speed.  He had only one slight failing:  when he got close to the fox, he would pull even, and then really turn on the afterburners, leaving the bewildered fox almost standing still by comparison.  You see, he forgot his goal;  he used up his energy running.  And this is a danger we might face in this study – we might get so caught up in the fun or arguing that we might forget why we are here – to explore the faith of the early church – and we might just run on by!

Now, remember, the first phrases of the Creed – three statements, really – were formed about 200 AD as a baptismal statement uttered by those who were receiving the sacrament of baptism.  These were words that confirmed their belief in God the Father Almighty, in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit.”  It is pretty safe to assume that every statement that follows in the Creed was added by one or another of the Church councils in a rebuttal of a contemporary heresy sweeping and threatening the Church.

 

The first argument might have come when the words God, Father, and Almighty were joined together.  The phrase does not appear anywhere in scripture.  However, the very first words of the Bible – In the beginning God – makes that part of the phrase obvious.  The following chapters defining the creative acts of God make the word “Almighty” an obvious choice, as well.  But, the word “father” could occasion some discussion:  The Jew would agree that God, as the creator of all things, created and was therefore Father of the Jewish people.  And this was borne out in their mind by God’s special care of the people.  It is even seen in the Prophecy of Isaiah when he is condemning the nation for their apostasy which brought on lightning quick defeat by the Assyrians and an earthquake, to boot!  He said that the Israelites had been acting like “… a wayward son of God”. This is the first scriptural reference to such a relationship, but here, and in all other such references, the relationship is between the nation and the divine.

So, the Jewish and the Christian views part.  The Christian hears Jesus cry out “Abba”, a Hebrew word literally translated in the intimate sense of “Daddy”. At the beginning, Christians were affirming that God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Creed refers to Christ by his given human name, Jesus. Perhaps you remember the importance of names in Scripture – reflected in how often a name is changed by some important event in the life of the individual.  In the NT, for instance, Simon becomes Peter, and Saul becomes Paul.  In the society of the American Indian, names hold great importance:  a child is first named by the first thought or sight of the mother at birth time. So, we have Running Bear or Quarter Moon.  Later the young man is given a name which he has earned or a name reflecting who he has become:  Straight Arrow.

In England, in the Middle Ages, a child would bear the name of his father or his father’s trade.  He might be the son of a man named John, and he became Johnson.  If the family trade was barrel making, he might assume the name Cooper (as barrel makers were called).  If his father stood under the spreading chestnut tree, he might assume the name Smith.

In the Jewish home, however, names applied at birth reflected either the hope of the family for this child or the faith of the family.  But, there was also a means by which the name might be changed if the given name was no longer appropriate.  Early in the OT we encounter the baby whose name was Jacob, a word which literally means “one who takes the heel” or “one who supplants”.  He was given this name because he was the second child, immediately following his brother Esau.  It proves to be a good name for him because he steals his elder brother’s birthright by deception (Genesis 25:21-34)  In later years, he undergoes a radical change in his lifestyle and character, following a dream he has in which he is wrestling with an angel (or God).  He gets a new name, Israel, a name which means “one who strives with God”  (Genesis 32:28)

So, what does the name Jesus mean?  it was a statement of his mother’s faith – Yahweh is salvation.  We gather that his naming is a result of Mary’s conversation with the Angel Gabriel, although it was actually a rather common boy’s name at that time, somewhat similar to John or Robert today.  In the OT it would have been Joshua.

The Creed uses the name Christ, a Greek word that means Messiah (literally, “the anointed one”) reflecting the people’s deep seeded desire for a change at God’s hand. The Creed might also have used the word Savior for this was also a word the Jewish people were using to express their desire for divine assistance.  It is said that every Jewish mother looked into the face of her newborn son and wondered, “Is this the savior” and that men looked into the eyes of passing strangers and wondered, Could that be the savior”.

Back to the Creed:  “and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.”  The important word is the modifier only, as far as theologians are concerned.  In the OT kings were often referred to as “sons of God”.  Indeed, the whole line of kings of Israel – good and bad – bore that title.  But the word “only” elevates Jesus above all other people in the world, to a relationship shared by no other.  This was immediately important, for in his generation, there were many others claiming to be the Messiah or the Savior.  This separated Jesus against all the others.

Notice the word 0ur.  To the Jew this was important.  He was not looking for one who would save the world, but one who would save the Jews.  Remember how disappointed Jonah was when he discovered that God was going to spare the people of Ninevah?  In the Creed, the pronoun would be equally important because it reflected the Christian’s possession of the One who came:  he is to be the personal savior, as well.

The next word is Lord, a rather common word of respect in the OT, used freely of royalty and owners of property.  In the NT it is used more than 600 times, always referring to Jesus.  The NT writers felt that the world should be set aside for holy use and not common usage.

There we have the first grouping in the Apostles’ Creed, dating perhaps back as far as 200 AD.  It mentions none other than the Godhead, the Trinity, nor does it attempt to make any historical references.  It does not yet seem to reflect any tension in the Church, any heretical movement that cried out for correction.  It is a simply stated affirmation of belief.

1 Latourette,  A History of Christianity, p 129