“Faith might best be compared with love.  Neither faith nor love is a point of view.  If someone said:  Tonight, I defend love as a point of view, it would sound absurd.  Love is a reality engendered by a relationship.  Love develops from the encounter of two human beings . . . It is felt to be a sweet domination of our being and it stirs the desire to share our life with the loved one.  It is the same as faith.  The Other enters into our lives as the Lover.  We then realize that we are not worthy of love, and we feel it to be an undeserved gift, a grace.  The Other is God.”
—J. T. Wiersma and J. W. Schulte Nordholt, The Apostles’ Creed Interpreted in Words and Pictures

The Creed

Chapter One: “I Believe . . .”

From its first word, the Apostles’ Creed is personal.  By employing the word “I,” it drives home with clarity the fact that the faith of which it speaks is to be professed by each one of us, singly and individually.  Though others share it with us, the faith we profess in the Apostles’ Creed is expected to be our own.  When we recite the Apostles’ Creed, we speak for ourselves and not for anyone else.  When we say the creed in worship, we speak along with others, but not for them.

All who profess the creed do so in light of the burden and the privilege of being responsible selves, able to answer both for what they are and what they believe.  The Apostles’ Creed presupposes that we are free to answer, able to answer, and required to answer, the fundamental questions of life on our own behalf, in our own voice.  The creed begins with a person, a living soul, possessed of will and bound by duty, able to perceive truth and required to hold it.  The more fully we contemplate the initial fact of the creed, the more clearly we understand the nature and scope of our responsibility before God and our fellow creatures.  We are called upon to declare, to profess, and to proclaim the content of our commitment.  Like Luther before his interrogators, when we recite the Apostles’ Creed we state clearly where we stand.  We could not do otherwise and remain true to our calling.

Put differently, every Christian is expected to answer the question Jesus asked the man born blind, and to answer it in the same way:  “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asked.  The reply He heard was the reply He required:  “I believe” (John (9: 35, 38).  In the Apostles’ Creed, we express our own faith because by it we either stand or fall.  Our salvation rests upon our own belief, not that of others.  In short, the Apostles’ Creed presupposes that, as a child of God, you have the ability, the right, and the obligation to speak.  And when you do, the first thing you ought to say is not simply “I,” but “I believe.”

Historically, the “I” to which the creed refers was, of course, the candidate for baptism, whose credible profession of faith was required before the rite of initiation could properly be administered.  Part of that credible profession of faith included the candidate’s own personal affirmation of belief in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.  By such affirmations, the catechumens were, in Augustine’s words, making with the mouth a profession of the personal faith they carried in their hearts (Augustine, Treatise on Faith, 321).  The candidate for baptism made this three-fold profession of faith only after having pronounced a three-fold renunciation, which included a renunciation of the devil, of his service, and of his work.  Thus, it becomes clear that the faith of the Apostles’ Creed is the faith of a conversion, of an about-face, in which old habits and attachments have passed away and from which new loyalties and new commitments emerge.              

By beginning as it does on a personal note, the Apostles’ Creed differs from the original form of the Nicene Creed, which began with the words “We believe,” words by which the Nicene Creed represented itself not so much as the faith of a Christian but as the faith of the whole Church.  This difference is instructive.  “It gives expression to that strong consciousness of individual responsibility which has ever been the characteristic of Western Christianity, and brings home the facts of the faith to each simple believer who confesses them” (Maclear, An Introduction to the Creeds, 41).

But though much can and should be made of the “I” of faith, too much can (and often has been) made of it as well.  This mistake, however, the creed itself does not make.  Though the creed begins on the very personal note of individual belief, and though it presupposes a turning away of oneself from the old ways, the creed does not leave the “I” of faith sequestered or alone.  Before it closes, the creed also affirms belief in the “holy catholic Church” and in “the communion of saints,” of which the “I” is but a part, and not a part in isolation.  To these important affirmations we shall turn in due course.

Thus, although the “I” of personal faith is properly fundamental, Christianity is not a privatistic religion.  Ours is not a faith meant to be cloistered, least of all from other Christians.  As Bishop Westcott once observed, while we each one say “I believe,” we say it in conscious fellowship with those about us.  And this personal confession, he said, if we reflect upon it, makes our union with other Christians more real and more close because it articulates the deeply held commitments we freely share with one another.

Thus, while the faith of the Apostles’ Creed is the faith of an individual, it is an individual faith shared by the Church everywhere and always.  The creed inculcates what might be called an inclusive individualism, not isolationism.  When we recite the Apostles’ Creed, we speak for ourselves; but we speak in unison and in concert with the entire Church.  The Apostles’ Creed is simultaneously personal and ecumenical.  If it were not, it would be a lesser creed.

The faith of the Apostles’ Creed is not only personal in its subject, it is personal in its object as well.  It is the belief of a person in a Person.  We do not say “I believe in something,” but “I believe in God.”  The preposition in is of great importance because to believe in someone is to put your trust in him.  In that light, the Christian faith is trusting in God as Christ has revealed Him.  Furthermore, when we profess our belief in God in the Apostles’ Creed, we imply that the object of our faith is not merely something we know, but Someone that also knows us.

As commonly understood, the belief of which the creed speaks is made up of both assent and trust.  Assent is primarily cognitive and intellectual.  It pertains to what we believe, to that which is the content of our faith.  Trust indicates our attachment to the One in whom we believe, the object of our faith.  The difference between these two dimensions of faith is sometimes depicted as the difference between saying “I believe that,” (which is assent) and “I believe in,” (which is trust).  Put differently, faith is both a rational commitment and an act of confidence; it is both a knowing and a doing.  To understand faith more completely, we must examine these two dimensions separately.

First, though theologians like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas have reached somewhat different conclusions on the matter, it seems to me that assent is normally prior to trust and is usually its foundation.  That is, it seems on the whole more reasonable to expect one to believe that something is true and to have some rudimentary understanding of it before putting one’s trust in it than it does to put one’s trust in something before believing it is true and trying to understand it.  But by no means is this sequence either normative or universal.  Many Christians seem to have followed the opposite route.  They seem rather to have believed in order to understand, not to understand in order to believe.  To me, however, the better path lies in the other direction:  Understand first.  But to this issue the creed does not expressly address itself.  The creed simply expresses faith, and it does so without stopping to specify either faith's normative sequence (if such there be) or its precise character.

Regarding its intellectual component, Christian faith is closely allied to reason and to truth.  Conscious attachment to that which is opposed to knowledge, or to that which is somehow irrational, is not faith.  It is credulity; it is a sin of the intellect.  Credulity is not faith; credulity is superficial assent; it is indolence and mental malpractice.  In short, credulity is an abdication of intellectual duty.  It was not for the purpose of neglect that we were given minds.  Those were invariably unproductive times for the Church when theology untied itself from the moorings of knowledge, of history, and of reason, as it seems to have done in our own age.  But the faith professed in the Apostles’ Creed is not so.  Neither is that of the Bible.  The Old Testament principle that “you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6: 5), reappears in the New Testament with a very important addition:  “and with all your mind” (Matt. 22: 37).  That is why we are instructed to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3: 15).  

Christian faith is neither ignorant nor unreasonable; rather, it is faith founded upon fact, specifically the hard facts of history.  The foundations of the Christian faith are primarily historical, not speculative.  Both Christian theology and the Bible from which it is drawn have history, not philosophy, as their foundation.  We believe about the Christian faith what we do because at a particular time and place God intervened in human history.  This intervention is unique, and in good theology it serves as the foundation for every important article of Christian assent.  Virtually everything about God and about himself that any Christian can reasonably be asked to believe ought to be related carefully to these historical facts and derived directly and reasonably from them.  As Bishop Westcott observed,

“We believe in God, and we declare His nature by recounting what He has done in the limits of time and space.  We do not attempt to describe His essence or His attributes in abstract language.  We speak of His works and through these we form in our human ways some conception of what He is.”  (Westcott, The Historic Faith, 25) 

Thus, the Christian faith is not without its visible and historical indicators, and the Apostles’ Creed itself directs our attention to them.  The first of these indicators is creation, which the creed mentions as the work of God.  But most of the historical indicators to which the creed refers pertain to the life and work of Jesus Christ, to events done at precisely articulated times and places (Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate”) and in carefully indicated sequences (Christ “was crucified, died, and was buried; on the third day He rose again from the dead”).  Such affirmations indicate not only the “what” of belief, but also the “when” and the “why.”  One of the reasons we trust Christ is because He rose from the dead — a fact that not only helps to show why we believe, but which helps us to give definition to our conception of the love of God and the power of God.

By means of these historical indicators, the faith of the Apostles’ Creed looks back to the past, to the life of Jesus; and it looks at the present, to the created world around us.  It also looks forward to the final forgiveness of sins, to the bodily resurrection, and to eternal life.  It does so because it has seen in Christ, in space and time, historical indications of things to come.  Thus, contrary to popular misconceptions, faith is based on knowledge; not ignorance, not groundless hope, not empty wishes.  Paul’s way of saying this was to assert that he knew the One in whom he had trusted and, because he did, he was convinced that his future was secure (2 Tim. 1: 12).  John strikes a similar note by confirming to his readers that what he writes to them are things that he himself had seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears, and touched with his own hands (1 John 1: 1-3).  Or, to echo James, if faith without works is dead, faith without knowledge is superstition.

Christian faith is not at all the same as, nor is it nurtured by, either the absence of knowledge or a flight from reason.  Orthodoxy entails historical facts and sound thinking.  It involves knowledge, and knowledge — real knowledge — involves truth.  This truth is the food both of our minds and our souls.  The faith of the creed, because it is a sound faith, presupposes truth and a rational order, things which, if they are to be properly understood, require a disciplined mind.  The one who has no conception of, or commitment to, a rational order, is not a person of faith; he is the target of every charlatan who comes down the pike.   Many Christians, nevertheless, though quite properly inclined to use their minds constructively and effectively in all other affairs, decline to do so in the religious.  Their reluctance engenders the daunting plethora of difficulties associated with ignorance, such as spiritual poverty and doubt.  But faith seeks understanding. Theological ignorance, indeed ignorance of any kind, is not a mark of faith, but of indolence and credulity.  It is the door, not to blessing, but to theological barbarism.

Second, as we indicated above, faith is not a mental virtue only. What counts is not simply one’s possession and understanding of faith, but also its use.  In fact, if you do not use your faith, if you do not commit yourself to it and act upon it, you probably do not have it.  To have a faith and not to use it, to have a faith and not be committed to the object of that faith, is not the faith of the creed; it is delusion.  Christian faith is not only knowing, it is doing.  Christian faith requires more than clear thinking and a positive intellectual content; it requires that you vigorously lay hold of that in which you believe, that you give yourself to it.  Thus, while sound reason and a commitment to fact constitute the intellectual side of faith and serve to protect the believer from making unworthy and misguided attachments, the trust or commitment side of faith is that which gives it life and prevents it from being a merely mental exercise. 

Faith is energetic and active.  Because faith is a living, daring confidence in the grace of God, it does not fearfully or fretfully grope about in the dark, unable or unwilling to think or do anything on its own.  Instead, when it is healthy and well formed, faith is eager, energetic and daring; it is willing to suffer hardship for the sake of the truth to which it has committed itself.  In short, to have a faith and to live it is an inestimable and energizing privilege.

But Christian faith is not doubt free; no position in life is.  Atheists and agnostics have their bouts with doubt, just like their Christian counterparts.  As Joseph Ratzinger explains,

“However vigorously [the unbeliever] may assert that he is a pure positivist, who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses, and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty whether positivism really has the last word. Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non-believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, and the real totality of the world which he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole... Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world.  In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.  Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of belief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident... [B]oth the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being.” (Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 20, 21)             

All persons have doubts, and the doubts that arise in the mind of a Christian are not unlike those that arise in the minds of all persons who think seriously about life.  But the wisest among us realize that the mere presence of doubt is not, nor ever can be, determinative.  They have learned to doubt their doubts, not simply their beliefs.  They also have learned that doubt, when squarely faced, is an avenue to stronger and more mature faith, even though for the moment it is painful or grievous.  Doubts, when confronted and conquered, are the proof of faith.  In that light, the faith of the Apostles’ Creed has been proven.  Throughout its many centuries of use, the creed has been the occasion for doubts of various sorts, not one of which is without an answer or a remedy.  Like those who profess it, the creed has emerged strong and unbroken from the smoke and battle of confrontation with doubt and unbelief.  In so doing, the creed and its adherents have proven the truth of Paul’s observation that we are more than conquerors in Christ (Rom. 8: 37), an observation which implies that not only are we victorious in our battles of faith, but we emerge from those battles stronger than we were when we entered.

Nor do people often understand that doubt itself has within it a distinctive element of faith.  When one begins to doubt one’s beliefs and begins sincerely to question the answers at hand, one does so only on the belief that better answers are both possible and worth having.  If you believe no answers are possible, you cease to search for them.  Thus, to travel hopefully is an act of intellectual faith.  To pursue the answers to questions raised by doubt is compatible only with faith, but not with faith's opposites — the intellectual despair that denies that answers can be had, on the one hand, and the spiritual complacency and self-satisfaction that delude one into thinking that one’s beliefs require no further scrutiny or refinement, on the other.

Christian faith is neither self-generated nor self-sustained.  It carries neither its origin nor its norm within itself.  For those things the believer must look to God as He has been revealed in history in Christ and in words in Scripture.  Christian faith arises in response:  in response to God’s revelation, in response to God’s initiative, and in response to God’s offer.  In other words, the source of Christian faith is also its goal.  The faith that ends in commitment to God begins with the will and grace of God.  Faith is the echo which God’s call creates in the hearts of those who believe.  Thus, faith is first of all a work of God and only secondarily a human response.

Concerning faith's benefits, Thomas Aquinas long ago correctly perceived that not only is Christian faith a requirement of the first order, but that it yields four inestimable advantages.  By it, (1) “the soul is wedded to God;” (2) “eternal life is begun in us;” (3) we “know whatever is necessary for living well;” and (4) “we conquer temptations” (Aquinas, Sermon Conferences, 19, 21).

To summarize, the faith of which the creed speaks is a personal faith, personal both in its subject and its object.  This faith is also the faith of conversion, indicating both a rejection of the old ways and a hearty attachment to the new.  As such, the faith of the Apostles’ Creed is comprised of two elements — assent and trust.  But these two elements, though lively and strong, do not render faith entirely doubt free.  In that respect, Christian belief is like all other serious human commitments.  Of the two constituent elements of faith, the former (assent) indicates the content of belief; the latter (trust) indicates our relationship to its object.  That is, we believe the doctrine; we believe in God.  Thus, while the subject of faith is the individual Christian, its proper object is not simply the creed, but Christ.  The God revealed in Christ is the object of faith, and in relation to Him we exercise our trust.

Exactly who this Person is in whom we trust, and what precisely He is like, is the focus of the following chapters.

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“What gives faith its seriousness and power is not that man makes a decision, nor even the way in which he makes it... On the contrary, faith lives by its object... The seriousness and power of faith are the seriousness and power of the truth, which is identical with God Himself.” —Karl Barth, Credo

date modified:
6 July 2006