The Apostles’ Creed
Friday Highlight – The Apostles’ Creed
Over the last month, we have been in a teaching series titled Essentials – What we believe. This series has been focused on looking at how our statement of as a local and modern church holds to the historical confessions of faith that remain and have been essential to Christians. One of the earliest creeds was the Apostles’ Creed. Justin Holcomb, in his book Know: The Creeds and Councils, gives us a helpful overview of this creed. Below is excerpt from that book. As we continue in our series, let us grow in confidence that we are a modern church rooted in the historical confessions of our faith, and that is a very good thing. When you read the Apostles’ Creed, what essential beliefs do you hear that are expressed in our church’s statement of faith?
APOSTLES’ CREED – ca. 140
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried; He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and [sits] on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.
The Apostles’ Creed is the oldest creed of the church, and its influence can be seen in many of the subsequent creeds in church history. The Apostles’ Creed was so named because of a tradition that emerged in the sixth century that each of the apostles contributed one of the creed’s twelve articles, or statements of belief. This story, although ancient, is almost certainly a legend: the Apostles’ Creed is not a direct production of the apostles themselves. Rather, the justification for continuing to call this formulation the Apostles’ Creed is that it preserves the “rule of faith” that was transmitted from the apostles. It should be understood as a summary of apostolic teaching.
The creed is an early witness to the apostolic teaching, and not an attempt to attribute a later document to the apostolic era. This can be seen from its development from the so-called Old Roman Creed that was used during baptisms, which can be dated from the middle of the second century (about AD 140) in Greek and in Latin around AD 390. The Old Roman Creed featured the main tenets of the Apostles’ Creed, with a few additions that are explained in the next section. The present form of the Apostles’ Creed, which is both longer and more recent, was probably not compiled until the middle of the fifth century.
If you could go only by this creed (the earliest collection of “essentials”), what would you say that Christianity is? It is encouraging and surprising how many of the doctrines that we hold today appear here. There’s the incarnation (“Christ . . . was conceived by the Holy Ghost”), and the story of the Gospels (“suffered . . . was crucified, died, and buried . . . He arose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven”). There isn’t yet an explicit doctrine of the Trinity, but the creed wants the reader to know that God is tied to the names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and that Christ is said to still be alive and preparing for his role as cosmic judge. God’s forgiveness of sins and promise of physical resurrection are also present, and it is reasonable to assume that these are connected to the snapshot of the gospel story that accompanies the description of Christ. In short, knowing nothing else about Christianity, you could find out who God is, the story of what happened to Jesus of Nazareth, and what will happen next.
Much of the genius of the Apostles’ Creed is in how it shows the supernatural significance of historical events. In a secular age, God the Father, the ascended Christ, and the Holy Spirit seem much less certain than the things that we can see and experience every day. The message that God has forgiven sin because of Christ’s sacrifice seems distant from the reality of a crucified religious leader. In the early church, it was important to ground religious belief in the historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth — hence the gospel snapshot in the creed — against the elaborate myths of their rivals, the Gnostics, who were interested in Jesus as a figure for their spiritual allegories. In our day, we have the opposite challenge: how do we keep up our religious beliefs when the mundane realities of our daily lives make it hard to grasp that God interacts with our world?
The Apostles’ Creed answers both challenges. It denies that the Christian story is merely myth, but it also affirms that we have a glimpse into the supernatural world through it. It goes on to show the outworking of the historical Jesus and the supernatural world in our daily lives. The communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are ways in which we can relate to and experience God, because of Christ, and through the Holy Spirit, in our everyday, mundane lives, proving that the supernatural still breaks through into the world. And it ends by reminding us that, just as Jesus’ time on an ordinary earth ended with his ascension into a very unordinary glory, so too will our everyday experience of the Holy Spirit end with our own resurrection and exaltation. C. S. Lewis wrote, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare . . . it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
The Apostles’ Creed reminds us of this reality, and the reason for our hope, in clear, simple terms.[1]
[1] Excerpt from: Holcomb, Justin S.. Know the Creeds and Councils (KNOW Series Book 1) Zondervan. Kindle Edition.