We believe...

I have a good friend who is an Episcopal priest. When she and I get together we often have passionate talks about church and theology and all manner of stuff. Last night in the midst of one of those conversations she said something that I think is very helpful so I thought I’d write about it here.

In the course of this conversation the issue of core beliefs came up. You see, the Episcopal church places a very high value on inclusivity. They try very hard not to have anyone turn away on the basis of non-essential beliefs, so hard in fact that they sometimes experience turmoil in their own community. But this begs the question of what are those core beliefs.  Maybe more important, what are the core beliefs (if there are any) that tie us all together as followers of Jesus?

To this question I offered the thought that some emerging-postmodern-reflective Christians seem to be turning back to the ancient creeds of the faith to find a baseline for beliefs.

What are the creeds? In essence they are responses to specific heresies that arose in the early church. According to church historian Justo Gonzalez, what has become known as the Apostle’s creed probably came to be in the mid-second century in response to Gnosticism and Marcionism. The creed was originally presented in the form of three questions asked at baptism to affirm the believer’s affirmation of Trinitarian faith:

1. Do you believe in God the Father almighty?
2. Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Ghost and of Mary the virgin, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and died, and rose again at the third day, living from among the dead, and ascended unto heaven and sat at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the quick and the dead?
3. Do you believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy church, and the resurrection of the flesh? [1]

The other ancient creed is what arose from the Council of Nicea in 325, the first ecumenical council after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the realm. Among many other things, the bishops who gathered at Nicea were tasked with responding to the Arian controversy, again a challenge to Trinitarian faith. Their response was to create another Christian creed:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth, who for us humans and for our salvation descended and became incarnate, becoming human, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.[2]

Of course, these are translations from ancient languages into English and later tweaking has altered and added some words. However, it seems to me that the essential meaning of the creeds is to affirm the mystery of the human relationship with the divine Trinity, something that few of us can wrap our minds around completely.

Some might argue that the creeds are a later invention, unnecessary for our faith because they are extra-biblical. In my mind, they are meant to point to scripture and shed light on its essentials. I find it interesting that so many churches find it necessary to write out a “statement of faith” as if to modernize these belief statements.

As I noted in my review of Daniel Taylor’s book, The Myth of Certainty, the creeds serve my personal faith because they were created by wiser minds than mine and have been accepted by faithful people for centuries. Of course this does not make them any more “true” than a contemporary church’s statement of faith. For me, however, it makes them stronger sources for commitment.

And this is the crucial observation my friend made, that these statements begin with “believe.” These are not wildly optimistic statements of “fact” or “truth.” They are, in fact, the best we can do to explain a faith we can sometimes scarcely understand. If these essential statements of the Christian faith begin with “believe” then can we not agree that the lesser “beliefs” can be held as loosely too? That’s my hope.

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[1] Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity: Volume 1 - The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1984), p. 64.

[2] ibid. p. 165.