Dalgliesh was adept at concealing surprise. He asked gravely, “Which one, Sir Alred?”

            “Is there more than one?”

            “Three, actually.”

            “Good God! Well, take any one. They’re much the same, I suppose. How did they start? I mean, who wrote them?”

            Dalgliesh said, “The Nicene Creed was formulated by the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century.” The date inexplicably came to mind. “I think it was 325. The Emperor Constantine called the Council to settle the belief of the Church and deal with the Arian heresy.”

            “Why doesn’t the Church bring it up to date? We don’t look to the fourth century for our understanding of medicine or science or the nature of the universe. I don’t look to the fourth century when I run my companies. Why look to 325 for our understanding of God?”

            Dalgliesh said, “You’d prefer a Creed for the twenty-first century?” He was tempted to ask whether Sir Alred had it in mind to write one. Instead he said, “I doubt whether any new council in a divided Christendom would arrive at a consensus. The Church no doubt takes the view that the bishops at Nicaea were divinely inspired.”

            “It was a council of men wasn’t it? Powerful men. They brought to it their private agendas, their prejudices, their rivalries. Essentially it was about power, who gets it, who yields it. You’ve sat on enough committees, you know how they work. Ever known one that was divinely inspired?” ….

            “Still, it’s interesting. You’d think it would have occurred to them.”

            “He’d like to rewrite the Nicene Creed.”

            “The idea’s absurd.”

            “But probably less harmful to the human race than most of his other activities.”

P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders, pp.21-23

Actually it was a good question, even though Sir Alred did not realize that, since the time of Saint Paul, the Church has been wrestling with writing creeds. Today’s scripture passages were all snippets of ancient creeds, attempts by the biblical authors to encapsulate and interpret the meaning of the Christ event. Attempts at belief statements have often operated under the rubric of doctrine, dogma, discipline, confessions, affirmations of faith (today’s call to worship, for example), the “Historical Creeds” and, some would even claim, screeds!

Different words to describe belief statements have been used at different times, each carrying some historical baggage and the ever-present issues of authority. However authoritative you find them, they nonetheless represent attempts by the Church to succinctly articulate its basic beliefs. Listen to the various definitions, all drawn from Webster’s Dictionary:

Doctrine: A body of principles set forth by a body of believers.

Dogma: A religious truth established by divine revelation.

Discipline: Ecclesiastical laws and customs regulating the religious and moral life of the Church.

Confession: A declaration of religious belief (often associated with Reformed Churches such as Luther’s Augsburg Confession, The Westminster Confession).

Catechism: A manual or guide for moral and religious instruction.

Affirmations: Declarations of faith.

Creed: A concise, formal and authorized statement of important points of Christian belief.

So, in fact, Sir Alred was both correct and incorrect. Correct in that the “Historical Creeds” remain as written, but not correct in understanding that the Church and its various branches down to this day have written belief statements of various stripes and authority. The issue has always been authority, the Church’s “tradition” versus the Bible, God’s word. The Historic Creeds, specifically the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, remain a part of almost every branch of Christendom, including most Reformed Churches as well as Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church. They can be found, for example, in our Methodist hymnal, numbers 880, 881 and 882.

Why creeds in the first place? Because the faith was transmitted primarily in oral form until the invention of the printing press, and creeds served as a vehicle to encapsulate the faith in auricular prayer form recited in worship. Secondly the church grew up in a hostile environment of competing belief systems and therefore creeds were an attempt to define the church’s identity in terms of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, understood as God’s decisive act in history. In spite of all the permutations and combinations of belief statements, the “Historic Creeds” still remain as centerpieces for defining what we believe.

Can you name the three? Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian. Two out of three isn’t bad! They hold one thing in common. Their titles are misleading.

The Apostles’ Creed, the most recent of the three, was not written by the apostles. It more aptly should be described as the Apostolic Creed in that it was intended to summarize the Apostle’s teaching. This creed, in its present form, is a product of the eighth century, although there is historical evidence that similar creeds were in use in the fourth century and that the baptismal liturgies of the second century contained credal-like affirmations. Thus, we can infer that the earliest creeds or credal-like statements such as those found in today’s scripture were used not solely as affirmations of faith but for teaching the basics in connection with baptism.

The Nicene Creed was not a product of the Council of Nicaea in 325 but is believed to stem from the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople of 381. This creed is the baptismal creed for the Eastern Orthodox Church and was designed to specifically refute the Arian heresy, which questioned the full divinity of Christ. Hence it contains more technical theological language.

The Athanasian Creed was not written by Athanasius. It was intended as a summary of orthodox teaching on the Trinity and is in fact a theological and doctrinal discourse masquerading as a prayer. Its origins date back to the fifth century in Gaul.

The use of the creeds has varied through the ages. With the exception of the specialized Athanasian Creed, they were first of all designed to express the basic faith commitment every believer subscribed to at baptism. They were also efforts to safeguard “true” understanding of scripture from heresy, and they worked as syllabi of instruction as well as being a way to promote uniformity of belief in a wide-flung empire.

Today the value of the creeds is that they serve as connectors with most of Christendom. Somewhere around the globe today, in very different churches and denominations, people will be saying the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds, reminding us that we are part of a universal church. They also provide continuity in Christian faith through the ages, connecting today’s faithful to all those persons of faith who have preceded us from the time of Christ.

Let’s take a brief moment to examine the two primary creeds. First and foremost, they are in Trinitarian form. The opening statement in the Apostles’ Creed is “I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” a fundamental statement about our relationship to God. The second stanza is a brief narrative of the principle events in Jesus’ life. And the final section is “I believe in the Holy Spirit…” followed by some doctrinal statements about the significance of the Christ event. The significant difference between the two creeds is that whereas the Apostles’ Creed’s statements of faith all begin with “I believe…”, the same basic statements in the Nicene Creed all begin “We believe…” This distinction is important. The one is to remind us of our faith stance in baptism and confirmation while the other reminds us that we are a community of believers with a common understanding and not just a community of individual believers.

The Athanasian Creed has justly fallen out of favor and has been relegated to the fine print, even in churches who find it as having historical, if not doctrinal, value. It has fallen out of favor not only because of its convoluted discourse on the trinity (which isn’t bad, by the way), but because its opening and closing lines are anathema to the Reformed tradition. The Creed opens with: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic (with a capital C) Faith.” And the concluding verse of the prayer is equally offensive to a broader understanding of the church universal when it says: “This is the Catholic (with a capital C) faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”

Have you ever been to a high school commencement where the guest speaker exhorted his/her listeners to “be authentic to yourselves” and then said to you, sotto voce: “I hope these kids have more interesting selves to be authentic to than I did at eighteen.” Did you go the next step and pray: “I hope at college these young persons might find something more interesting than themselves.” Our society seems to revel in emotional striptease from the soaps to the talk shows to politics in Washington and Lansing. It seems being authentic to self does not seem to take much effort. The hard work is growing beyond that which is self-derived. Our challenge is to be true, not just to ourselves, or our feelings, but to be true to the God who calls us in Christ Jesus. Enter the creeds, the ancient faith of the church. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are the songs of our faith. They are an ongoing tradition that connects us with other Christians as well as becoming a conversation across three millennia. Through recitation of the creeds, the barriers of time and circumstance come down and we are united in a faith that is much larger than our several circumstances. The value of the creeds is to connect and remember. (This paragraph taddled* from the Anglican Digest.)

Jim Eggleston, a member of this community, has written about his experience living in the Czech Republic. He writes:

Early in our most recent trip to Europe, I found myself standing next to some form of statuary in the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. The subject’s name, previously etched in marble, had been removed, smoothed over and, for all intents and purposes, eliminated from future generation’s consideration. In the Jewish quarter, the wall containing the etched names of the Holocaust victims had likewise been covered over and hidden by twentieth century oppressors in the Czech Republic.

These are the facts. Now for the rest of the story.

Milan Kundera is probably the only modern Czech author that makes extensive use of both traditionally religious and fundamental spiritual ideas in his writing. He is perhaps best know for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which has been made into an outstanding movie. However, in his first novel, The Joke, written under Communism and prior to his exile, there is a quote that brings instant clarity to the observations we made at the churches in Prague: “The power of the mythographers of Communism is to ‘organize forgetting’.”

For the better part of two complete generations, the Communists systematically worked at obliterating all physical and mental remnants of independent thinking, including the historical foundations for cultural and religious beliefs of the Czech people. Think about that for a minute – how would we have coped with such oppression?

How did the early Christians cope with such oppression or, for that matter, contemporary Christians in nations hostile to Christianity? Once again, enter the “Historic Creeds” for they are organized remembering. I commend them to you. 

(Oh, yes, that screed thing: “A long list or discourse; sometimes a tirade or diatribe,” but hopefully not in this morning’s case.)  

* Note:  Taddled is English slang for "taken from", a term often used in The Anglican Digest itself.