A course of sermons on the Apostles' Creed Ampthill Summer 2005
I believe in God
I think it is useful to attempt a course of sermons during the Summer, particularly if most of the work can be done with handouts so it is no great loss when people are on holiday and miss the sermon as delivered.
There is an obvious reason for reviewing the creed used when we were baptised, the creed of our catechism and confirmation, and the creed used daily in morning and evening prayer. In spite of its name, it is not quite as old as the Apostles, but it has been in continuous use in the Western church since the third century, with only one major revision. It is so old that it was originally in Greek, later translated into Latin and then English.
It has always been a creed for ordinary adults - baptism was, when it was first formed, understood as an adult matter (even if the children of Christians were also allowed to be baptised). This marks it out from the other two Creeds in the Prayer Book, which were originally for theologians (or at the least, to keep bishops in order).
This creed is a means for the ordinary adult to declare his or her allegiance to God. This is all about making a choice - a choice to reject the devil, the world and the flesh and to enrol in God's service. It is not about having an opinion that God exists (except of course logically, in that there is no sense in declaring your allegiance to something you know does not exist).
We made that choice (for most of us in confirmation, when we decided to take on for ourselves the promises which had been made for us in baptism). We do not renew our baptismal promises any more than we renew our marriage promises - for they are once for all decisions.
An analyst might say that the creed falls into two very unequal parts - these first four words I believe in God, which are the decision, and the rest, which is a commentary on what we mean by God. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that these first four words imply something about God in themselves, namely the unity of God in Himself and in all his doings.
That is why we recall every time we meet here that The Lord thy God is one Lord (using our Lord's own quotation from the Law). Everything that exists depends on the One Lord from whom it has its being and to whom it has a simple relationship. To the pagan world - as now to the Hindu world - this was a surprise, for they thought of many gods in competition. One might indeed give allegiance to one of them much as to a human leader, but this was a fairly random choice and none of them deserved worship. Or again, in the philosophical world with which the early church had to argue, there might (or might not) be one god (but not involved in the world) and a world which was equally ancient as that god and independent of him.
The church (and before it the Jews and after it Islam) have been very firm on this point. Whatever we say about the fall, there is one God and He is responsible for everything, either by His choice or His tolerance of the mistaken choices of lesser beings. Because of this essential unity, knowledge - and indeed science - is not a futile activity. There is a system, if man has the wit to discover it. Put another way, there is no evading God.
The relationship with God may be uncomfortable, but it is possible and we have chosen to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. God is One, and we too must be single-minded in our response to Him.
God is one, but nothing I have written denies the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (of which more in later sermons).
the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth
We do not realise how shocking this was when the creed was new. There were many who thought that God could not possibly so demean himself as to be involved in any way with the universe. A respectable God (ask the philosophers) can only keep isolated from the universe and contemplate himself in his solitary perfection.
But the Jewish and Christian belief is not in a respectable God. Not only does God himself and without intermediaries create the world (Genesis I) but he will so humble himself as to make coats of skin for the fallen man and woman (Genesis III) - I owe the recognition of the importance of this strange passage to my colleague at Letchworth. And indeed the whole of Old Testament history is not of a distant God but of a God involved with his people. There is a sense in which the Incarnation is not something altogether new, but the culmination of what had already been experienced.
Be that as it may, there were many hostile thinkers in the early centuries of the church who liked the idea of a distant God, not guilty of the mess of the world, to which the gifted could escape by some exotic practice. I suspect the modern talk about "spirituality" (while carefully avoiding the serious and therefore mundane practice of any faith) echoes this delusion.
This clause in the Creed, then, is full of apparent contradictions which are nevertheless essential to the faith. God is almighty - powerful over everything, incapable of being pushed around by human magic (another dreadful temptation in the ancient world). Yet God has used this power, not to maintain his isolation but to make heaven and earth (in his wisdom and to show forth his glory) and to be as a Father to them and to us.
The word "Father" is now difficult for many, because they have so little experience of family life and of the part played by an effective father in it. This is a blending of authority and caring, (which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews extends into disciplining - see Hebrews 12:7). It is not that there is no motherly imagery of God in the Bible, but it is comparatively rare. And it is wrong to trivialise "Our Father" into "daddy". Some mistaken scholars once suggested that "Abba" should be so translated, but there is no evidence for this. St. Paul in Romans 8:15 clearly and rightly translates Abba as"the Father". God is not indulgent.
God in Himself (apart from the incarnation of the Son) is without body, parts or passions as the first of the 39 Articles puts it; but in his dealings with us "He" is much less of a misunderstanding than "She" or "It". He has of set purpose involved himself with us on his own terms, not ours. We as Christians are as children in his family, brought into that family by the Son (this is argued in Hebrews 2:11-4). (Man come of age, if anybody can still remember it, is incidentally a denial of God's Fatherhood.)
I do accept that it is unfortunate that the Bible tends to talk of sons alone, not both sons and daughters, though this may be a problem of our tendency to a mechanical understanding of the text. Some have reacted to this by "inclusive translation". This is quite often honest (because indeed the Gospel is for both male and female equally) yet something is lost when the way in which Scripture expresses ideas, however strange to modern readers, is concealed from the reader.
There is much then in these few words for us to consider - and I have said nothing about the relationship of Father and Son within the Trinity.
and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord
Some very basic teaching may be useful.
"Jesus" is a name, and it would be silly to doubt that it was the name given by his parents. Like most Jewish names, it has a meaning and a history. Its meaning is "God saves". Its history is because it is (allowing for differences between Hebrew and Greek) also the name of Joshua, the leader when the Jewish people were able to begin to possess the Holy Land. So it is a name of hope, that God will establish the Holy Land again as a Jewish entity (rather than one subject to Romans, Greeks and Arabs). There were indeed grounds for hope, though what God did was very different.
"Christ" is not a name but an adjective meaning "anointed". Priests and kings were anointed by men, and this gave them status because God stood behind the rite (as is still the case with the coronation of the Sovereign in this country). Many were rightly so anointed; what makes Jesus different? The Gospels nowhere suggest that he was anointed by men. Rather, the claim is that he (in some way distinctively) was anointed by God and not men for a purpose beyond that of the priest and king. (The Hebrew for christ is messiah. I deliberately do not give either word a capital letter. To do so suggests that there was a known role of "Messiah" and Jesus knew all the moves he had to make before he started. It was not so.)
We need to be quite careful about "his only Son". The Bible does not always mean this in literal and physical terms, for the expression can be used of the nation Israel. But even in this sense the phrase suggests a unique mission.
"Our Lord" rubs in the point of"I believe", namely that for us Jesus has authority, indeed he exercises on earth the authority of God the Father, to whom the title first belongs.
But there is more to these few words than I have so far expounded. The relationship between God the Father and Jesus is not something transient, existing only for a few years of his earthly ministry, as it would be between God and a prophet. The Church came to believe (rightly, after trying all the alternatives and finding them wanting) that the relationship is eternal, (there never was a time when it was not in being). And the least silly way we have of understanding that relationship is the image of Father and (only-begotten) Son, though this is only our way of understanding what only the participants can know from the inside. We should be warned that the Church knew rather less about genetics, but far more about effective family life, than we do!
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary
It is confusing that we use the imagery of birth about two distinct matters - the relationship before and beyond time of the Father and the Son, and the situation of Jesus as being one person and yet at the same time both completely God, the second person of the Trinity and completely a human being. I am concerned more to explain what the faith is than to justify it; again, the Church tried all the alternatives and found them wanting. the very God who cared about his creation (as was expounded last time we met) chose to unite himself to it in order to rescue us. God who created man in the first place here makes a new creation, taking our humanity (as received from an ordinary woman, Mary is not to be viewed as an exotic being) and uniting it to himself for ever: he spake, and it was done.
We can't avoid the theological puzzles, but they are not at the heart of Christianity. Our allegiance to Jesus and so to the Father is.
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell.
People are sometimes surprised about what the Creeds do not say - that they contain nothing about our Lord's ministry. One reason is that it won't condense into a few pithy phrases. Another is that there is no problem about that ministry which a creed can tackle. Christians have always bonded with the human Jesus as disclosed in the New Testament; they do not need to be told to do so. Different people will be more attracted by different stories or different teaching; it cannot be otherwise and is not harmful.
The death is another matter, and it is vitally important, not least because muslims deny it. Certainly it happened. The Romans were professionals with much experience of crucifying people and they did not make mistakes. The death of Christ is the only fact about him found in a Roman (anti-Christian) source as well as the New Testament. The Christian faith has never been proclaimed without the death of Jesus at the centre.
It is not the fact that is central, of course, but the meaning. A notorious liberal Jewish scholar (and renegade Catholic priest) in book after book attempts to make the death a meaningless accident. Not so; it has never been proclaimed as other than the inevitable and essential consequence of Jesus' mission. Vermes has no explanation for the Christian Church.
The first point to appreciate is that death is the final proof of humanity. Jesus is not some magical semi-divine being but totally one with us, one of us, in all respects tried as we are.
The Gospels use Old Testament passages to bring out God's meaning and purpose, and it is hard to tell now to what extent particular details follow up scripture, to what extent they are eyewitness accounts. But the basic facts of death by crucifixion are as stated; and the rabbis taught that any criminal should be urged to offer his death as an atonement for Israel.
The burial and the descent into hell can be understood simply as insisting on the completeness of the death. This is part of what it means to be human; for the Jews, all the dead descend into Sheol, which is in Greek Hades. This is not so much a place of torment as the place of ex-people (of ghosts). But though Jesus enters Sheol as an ex-person, he is not a ghost - Sheol could not hold him, for the living God cannot die though the human Jesus did.
If we choose to emphasise "hell" (following the Latin rather than the Greek of the older form of the creed), then we must realise that the dead go to a place of separation from God (no other torment is required for those who know that the purpose of their existence is to live with God). But the Father and the Son cannot be separated - hell may receive Jesus, but it cannot hold him or, by consequence, those to who he brings salvation. Either way, this clause prepares for the resurrection.
It is perhaps surprising but important to notice that the creeds nowhere blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion; it is always "under Pontius Pilate", the Black Sea Greek who happened to be Roman governor. Individual Jewish leaders, a particular mob, must bear their share of the guilt; but this is not inherent in the Jewish people for all time.
As often as ye eat this bread and drink the cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come (I Corinthians 11.26). We must enter into that death. The Apostles' Creed was composed to give meaning and content to baptism, (which St. Paul already understands as as a death). Like Christ, we have to die (in baptism, daily, and at our death); but, please God, the life of Christ is formed in us to help us through this world.
the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.
What would infuriate a pious Jew of our Lord's time in this? Not the assertion of the resurrection; this was not universal but certainly a very widespread hope. Nor the ascension; for what else had God done for Elijah, who "went by a whirlwind to heaven"? (Though the implied claim to be equal with Elijah would be alarming, it might not be thought impossible.) No, the sitting would be the scandal, for how can any man - or angel - sit (and worse, remain seated) in the very presence of God himself. It would be blasphemous - unless, of course, the Lord is, as we believe, one with the Father and so properly at home with him in heaven. That is why the clause is in the creed, and this is not a late development, but a piece of theology as early as the Epistle to the Hebrews.
The resurrection is of course an essential part of Jesus' own faith. He lived in the faith that the Father could and would bring the faithful to heaven. It makes no sense to like some of his teaching but reject this.
There is a very serious danger of believing in a God who is too small. Maybe the Jews started from a tribal deity with just enough power occasionally to deliver them from earthly enemies, but the reason we still worship their God (and not Chemosh or any of thousands of other little Gods) is that God taught them more.
This is why the Church still reads the Old Testament, in order to learn (from its own history as the continuing people of God) how God taught them. He was not just the God of one people, but of all peoples. Not just of the living, but of both living and dead. Not just for the occasional victory in battle or good harvest, but for all of life, even to the "meanest sparrow", and eternally. This was the faith of the Lord; how can we claim to be his followers and substitute some lesser God again?
The Creed is not interested in the mechanics of resurrection and ascension. As with all spiritual events, meaning is far more important than tangible incident. That is why the Gospels (and the Acts) do not attempt to describe these events in themselves, only in their meaning, their consequences and the human reactions to them. I do not say there was no tangible incident. I do believe there was an empty tomb - mainly because so much early theology depends on the Lord taking his body (and so us as its extension) with him into heaven.
It has often been said that the best proof of the resurrection is the existence of the church. This is partly true, for nothing else explains the change among his disciples from the common Jewish belief that the general resurrection would happen to the new confident assertion that it already had happened. But this is not the whole story; the church exists not because it adopted a particular opinion (even on so important a topic as the resurrection) but because in so doing it responded to God correctly and so God blessed it, then and now.
If we think the resurrection is the chief miracle here, we should be careful. It is the most accessible, perhaps, but it is the ascension and sitting that entitle us to say that Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. He is not just a prophet whom the Father has vindicated, but the Son to whom authority is given.
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead
A theme which we can rightly take from the Creed (because it is there to be taken) is that we understand who Jesus is because of what authority he exercises - that of the Father.
So for this clause we look back to the longing in the Old Testament for the "day of the Lord", the day "when justice shall be throned in might, and every hurt be healed". Because it is not a formal, unexciting, legal process, but the moment when God shows his hand to establish that justice which man has defied. For Christians, no less than for Jews, Judgement Day is a time of hope because God will establish his kingly rule. So we pray, as we are taught, "thy kingdom come".
Some Christians are too fascinated by the details of the process. To be honest, as a scholar I am fascinated by the Revalation of St. John the Divine and by many another "apocalypse", Jewish and Christian. But the teaching I draw from them is not a calendar of days and events, but a promise that God will vindicate his rule "in earth as it is in heaven", will do so in respect of all the human race, alive or dead at the time, and will do so through his Son.
This teaching may be unfashionable (outside Evangelical circles) but we probably all know how attractive it has been to painters. Indeed, a "doom" painting was normal in churches both Western and Eastern.
I have first taken it not as an individual warning, but as a common hope. This may be surprising, but it was not mistaken.
Yet the individual warning is also valid. See 1 Corinthians 3:Each man's work shall be manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself shall prove each man's work of what sort it is. . . If any man's work shall be burned,he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet such as through fire. And this is not just St. Paul's teaching; remember the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where "the Son of Man", by which we are to understand Jesus himself, will indeed be the judge.
This is partly the irony that the world thought it judged and condemned him, but all the time it was the world that was being judged and condemned in that very act. Precisely because Christ is the expression of the Godhead in humanity, to know him and yet reject him is the Judgement.
Judgement is not an accidental part of Christianity. It is not where history is going, but the moment at which God shows his hand, throughout human history and in the way he ends it. How will we then respond? Some will despise and reject what God has done; they will prefer to be shut up in their own resentment. This is hell; all the remaining details are picture language (and none the worse for that). God in Christ is not vindictive; but he will give men what they choose. Others will, with whatever difficulty, and even very much at the last moment, see their mistakes and choose life. That is heaven; all the remaining details are picture language (and none the worse for that). God in Christ is not vindictive; he will give men what they choose.
If it were simple tit for tat justice, a mere counting of good and evil deeds, who could "stand when he appeareth"? But God's justice, which the Revalation calls the wrath of the Lamb, is far more subtle, far more searching, and yet far more generous to those who will receive generosity.
I believe in the Holy Ghost; The Holy Catholic Church.
We would hardly dare to put two so unequal ideas alongside each other, but the early Church usually did. We can find the reason in the Prayer Book catechism, which follows an ancient approach. We confess our faith in "God the Father who made me and all the world, in God the Son who redeemed me and all mankind, and in God the Holy Ghost who sanctifies me and all the elect people of God". There is a progressive narrowing down, and if God has any special gifts for his Church, then they will be given by the Holy Ghost rather than by Father or Son. (I should add that there are other ways of understanding the work of the Holy Trinity towards us.)
"Ghost" does not have its modern meaning, or lack of meaning. "Spirit" is a safer translation, but even that can be mistaken. The Holy Spirit is not a pale reflection of an absent God, but the very breath of God inspiring us; the Giver of Life who enables us to respond to God in accordance with the various gifts he gives us.
The Reformers perhaps thought of the Church as an invisible body, whose members were known only to God and which therefore could not have any saving effect. That is not what the Creed means. Its compilers saw the Church as a very tangible body, as visible as the Jewish Church of the Old Testament had been, a body in which the various gifts of the Spirit were integrated and worked together in the common life of the People of God.
The word "Church" is not about buildings (for several centuries, there weren't any, so we are in good company with the first Christians), but about the Assembly of God's people which He calls together (that is what the Greek and before it the Hebrew words mean). It is not a contrivance of man, but a creation of God.
Nobody among the first Christians thought that the Assembly, the Church, was perfect. There always were sins and sinners in the Church. "Holy" does not mean sinless, any more than the Jewish Church had been sinless. It does mean two things. First, that God has separated the Church out for His purposes (and not because it deserves it). It is elect because He has elected, or chosen, it. Second, that if there is any perfection, any achieved holiness, in it, this comes from God's action upon it by His Spirit.
"Catholic" is a word that can be misunderstood. It is not shorthand for Roman Catholic; it does not mean "high". It does mean universal - a Church which extends over as much of the inhabited world as it can, and a Church which extends over time with a past (going back to the Jewish Church) and a future (until the Lord come). In miniature, even the Traditional Anglican Communion is Catholic because it works in many parts of the world (English is only the seventh most important language!), builds on Anglican and indeed earlier heritage and looks to God's future.
The Creed knows only one Church. There were of course many congregations, each under its own bishop, but these were all in communion with each other, accepting each others' advice and discipline as well as sharing in the same Sacraments, fulfilling Christ's prayer that they should be One. We should be hesitant to speak of many Churches. It is safer to speak of many jurisdictions, to pray for unity of all those jurisdictions which do preserve the true faith, and humbly to submit ourselves to that unity so far as may become possible. That is what, so far as I understand it, the Traditional Anglican Communion is trying to do. It is not a new departure.
Whether countries should be "sovereign" and "independent" I leave to you to judge; Christian jurisdictions certainly should not attempt this.
the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins.
These are again two rather conflicting views of the Church, but of course both are true and important.
That said, it is perhaps wrong to say that the first one is true when nobody knows what it means! The Apostle's Creed was in Latin (though its predecessor the Old Roman Creed, is so old that it is in Greek) and in both languages there is no way of telling whether "saints" means holy people or holy things; and "communion" can be taken in different ways. So we might be believing that we share by the Holy Ghost in God's holy gifts or that the believers are by the Holy Ghost brought into a fellowship. In either case this is still part of our belief in the Holy Ghost, in God active amongst us by his Spirit, as explained last time, and indeed consequently part of our belief in the Holy Catholic Church.
It is safe, and probably wisest, to accept both alternatives. The immediate consequence of adult baptism, at which this creed was leamt, was First Communion, received with the whole church assembled at one of the great festivals (Easter or Whitsun). So how could the new Christian not have both meanings in mind. He met both the holy gifts and the holy people assembled together for the first time (for the unbaptised could not attend Eucharist) at his baptism. And because baptism has always been regarded as freeing from all past sins, he too was holy along with them.
But that could not be the whole story. For some centuries before the Creed was composed, the Church had know that it was not completely holy; that its members were still likely to commit sin. One should not make too much of this; there is little doubt that the early Christians were in general very holy, very upright by our standards. But within a few centuries they had to decide what sins after baptism could be forgiven - and so the sinner allowed to worship with the church again - and what sins had to be left to God (though both the sinner and the church might pray that God would forgive).
They tried the rule that a Christian might commit one and one only serious sin (such as denying the faith when persecuted) and be allowed back. But this meant that too many people avoided baptism until their deathbeds.
So the Church had to decide that sins could always be forgiven (if the sinner was truly sorry, resolved not to sin again, made any restitution necessary to those he had wronged and made some gesture of penitence. "Repentance" is as complete a turning to God and away from sin as we can manage - and it too is a work of the Holy Spirit in us.
In the Church of England, and therefore in the Traditional Anglican Church, we implement the forgiveness of sins by preaching of repentance, by "general confession" and by the declaring of God's forgiveness to the penitent in our worship. In reserve is always individual help by the priest, if anybody requests it.
This is surely a true following of Jesus' proclamation to so many "thy sins be forgiven thee". All sin is an affront to God, and yet God still wants us back even though we have sinned.
But on His terms, not ours. There is no place within God's system for those who invent their own religion (even if they call it Christianity) and so deny that things which have always be taught to be sinful are sins. The church has to be loyal to God and his teaching.
So the Church will always contain sinners, just as a hospital will always contain sick people. But in both cases the purpose of the institution is cure, even if the process of that cure is painful.
the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.
The creed, like the psalms, in this case might be thought to be saying the same thing twice, in which case we should not struggle overmuch to make distinctions between the two clauses. But though there is some truth in that, the first clause gives a precision to the second which is valuable.
The accurate translation of the Latin is found in the Prayer Book baptism service, where the Minister asks dost thou believe . . . in the Resurrection of the flesh? There is no scope for any ambiguity here.
Too many people think that Christianity teaches the immortality of the soul, of some intangible non-material aspect of a human being. This idea at best lurks on the fringes of the Bible, in for example the book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha, which makes too many concessions to Greek thought. Usually when we find the word "soul" in the Bible, it means little more than "self". "Body and soul" is not an analysis of a human being into two distinct components, but a single totality.
We believe that the risen life is bodily because bodily life is what it is to be human; if there are such things as ghosts, these are poor relics of what once was human - not a future which anybody would desire!
We know that our bodily make-up is constantly changing; we are not offered the very atoms which were part of our body at one particular moment. We are offered a bodily life like, but better, any we have known.
That is why we are also offered a "new earth" rather than just heaven. We are the creatures we are, and our life - as much our eternal life as our present life - only makes sense in something very like this earth. God will not torture us by transferring us after death into some environment of which we can make no sense.
What can we say about that "new earth"? The most important feature is the open presence of God. Here, we at best dimly appreciate his presence with us; there, it will be axiomatic. The lesser feature, but still important, is that it is earth without limitations. Here, there are so many possibilities which we struggle to realise even badly; there, we have the time to perfect our skills. This is not exclusively or even particularly about religion. God in heaven delights in perfected humans, that is in every aspect of our lives that is not evil. Of course, each of us has different perfections; we will not be all the same in the world to come, but will fulfil our very differences.
The creed ends, and rightly, with "the life of the world to come". For it is a map for Christians, of how to get through this world and where the route goes thereafter. It is about success. It does not tell us about hell (apart from what I have already said about Christ's descent to the place of the dead and about judgement). Christianity is not about avoiding hell, but about the love of God which will lead us to his presence. If we have to think of hell at all, it is because some people (as indeed some angels!) may so distort their lives that their organising principle becomes the deliberate and conscious rejection of God and of all that is good. In the end, God allows them that very rejection. The lurid pictures of hell work out not so much God's wrath as his tolerance of rejection. Hell is not "other people" but the turning in on oneself and rejection of everything else.
We are already very members incorporate in the mystical body of God's Son, and also heirs (through hope) of his everlasting kingdom. That is what the Communion Service says, and rightly of any faithful Christian, however imperfect we know our lives to be. This present life is our preparation; the life of the world to come is the fulfilment of that preparation. May God help us to continue on that path!
Some concluding remarks
No preacher should pretend to be original. There have been many good commentaries on the Apostles' Creed. For those who want something quite simple, look for Ronald Knox "The Creed in Slow Motion". For those who want something heavier, Karl Barth "The Faith of the Church" and "Dogmatics in Outline". (All these I have as paperbacks - I do not know whether they are still in print.) For a very extensive treatment, the modern Roman "Catechism of the Catholic Church" is in part structured as a commentary on the Apostles' and Nicene creeds (rather jumbled together, unfortunately, and at such great length that one loses the thread). I have not been much concerned with the history of the text, but J N D Kelly "Early Christian Creeds" gives a full account of both the Old Roman Creed and the Apostles' Creed, together with an analysis of the original meanings.