“If Jesus is our Lord, then His commandments must be the rule of our lives.”
—H. C. Beeching, The Apostles’ Creed

“It is a truism to say that Christianity is a belief in Christ; but is it not a forgotten truism?”
—B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith

The Creed

Chapter Three: “and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord”
“Et in Jesum Christum, filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum."

Insofar as God is to be understood by us at all, that understanding is best fostered by looking at Jesus Christ, for in Jesus Christ God Himself has left his footprints in human history.  Christ, and Christ only, is the perfect exposition of God, without which our ideas of Deity are lost in vagueness, speculation and wishes.  The Son brings God into our fallen world so that we might more clearly see and better understand the One to whom we are answerable and to whom we owe everything. 

In other words, the God of whom we spoke in the creed’s first article is accessible to us, or revealed to us, most fully in Jesus of Nazareth, whom we confess in the article considered here.  In Jesus Christ, God gives Himself to us most fully and irreversibly.  By encountering Christ, therefore, we understand more precisely what the word “God” means, for in Christ God and man are drawn together, as it were, face to face. 

As with its confession concerning the Father, the creed’s Christological statements are not speculative flights into metaphysics; rather, they rest upon a historical figure and historical events.  God Himself appeared in our world; if you want to see Him, you must examine the historical Jesus and his words and deeds.  The Christ of metaphysics, of fancy, and of certain strains of dogma will not do and is not in view.  The God of Christians is the God of Jesus and the God who is in Jesus.  Our conception of Christ must be, as is that of the creed, rooted in history.  We cannot well understand what Christ is without first comprehending what He did and was.  The creed’s recitation of historical facts in its Christological affirmations reminds us that our religion has its roots not so much in the dreams of visionaries or the speculations of philosophers, but in historical reality itself and in the God who stands behind it and who reveals Himself in it.  Our religion was revealed in human life, in human history.  Just as the Jews of old looked back upon their past and recounted for themselves and their posterity the mighty acts of God in history, even so the candidate for baptism, when reciting the Apostles’ Creed, chronicles for himself and others what God has done and will do in Christ in time — the mighty acts of redemption.

To know and remember this is to avoid the error of the earliest heretics, who denied not Christ’s divinity, as perhaps one might expect, but his humanity.  The historical assertions in the creed regarding Jesus of Nazareth are antidotes to egregious errors of that sort.  Because the Christian message is a message about Christ, because Christ is an historical person and not a philosopher’s idea or a seer’s dream, the Christian message is an historical message; it is a message of history in history.  Thus, though our understanding of Christ must not be merely historical, it must be historical at least and historical always.     

When we confess Jesus Christ in the creed, therefore, we return naturally to the historical events that helped form the basis of our faith, those events without which no faith and no Church would exist.  Those events, those facts concerning the historical Jesus, are the core data of good doctrine.  They are the heart of the Christian confession and the touchstone of our knowledge of God.  Without them we go astray.  To understand their significance and to apply it wisely is the task and purpose of theology.  To those facts and events we turn when we study or recite the creed’s second article, and they are our concern here and in the chapters immediately following.

Though to believe in God is not at all unique to Christians, to believe in God as He is revealed in Jesus Christ most assuredly is.  Consequently, the theological center of gravity in the Apostles’ Creed is the collection of clauses expressing both our belief in Christ and our beliefs about Christ.  That is why, when you see the creed in its entirety, by far the largest portion is taken up with our confession concerning Jesus.  The faith of the creed is faith in Christ.  Faith in Him is what gives our religion its distinctive shape and flavor.  Faith in Him is something we do in obedience to the command of both Father (1 John 3:23) and Son (John 14:1).

The creed introduces that faith here with two brief but important words: “and” and “in” — “and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.”  Though it would be easy to do so, one must not overlook those two small words, because they bear considerable theological significance.  The word “and” serves a double function.  It both separates and connects the subject of the creed’s first article and that of its second.  Read as a divider, the word “and” prevents us from confusing Father and Son, or from melting them into a divine unity without distinctions, as did the ancient Sabellian heresy.  Read connectively, however, the word “and” helps us see that Christian faith is based upon a conjunctive revelation of the Father by the Son.  To believe in one is to believe in both.  Put another way, when read disjunctively, the word “and” helps us understand that Father and Son are separate Persons, not to be confused.  Read conjunctively, however, this word helps us realize that to see the Son is to see his Father as well.  As Jesus Himself said, “I and my Father are one; he that has seen me has seen the Father” (John 10:30; 14:9).  The theological significance of the word “in” we addressed in the previous chapter and need not repeat here.  It behoves us only to call to mind now that when we confess our faith in Christ we are not so much attesting to our belief in a doctrine about Him as we are to our faith in Him.  The Jesus in whom we believe is not a dogma; He is the Son of God.  He is our Lord.

“Jesus,” the Hellenized and Anglicized version of the Hebrew name “Yehoshua” by which Christ was known as a man, means “God is Savior” or “God is Deliverer.”  That name was given to Him by Joseph and Mary in obedience to an angelically mediated divine command:  “You shall call his name Jesus,” they were told, “for He will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).  In accordance with his name, Jesus reveals, acquires, and bestows upon us our salvation.  He reconciles us to the Father and redeems us from bondage to sin.             

The name “Jesus” identifies a particular man, a unique historical identity, who, like all things historical, is singular and is never to be repeated.  We have in the person of Jesus what Kierkegaard once called the scandal of particularity:  This man, this man only, is God for us and God among us.  Out of this particularity emerges the universal hope of our race, for in Him, and only in Him, are all nations blessed.

This Jesus, this unique figure of history, we also call “Christ,” a name derived from the Greek word meaning “anointed.”  “Christ” itself is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew title “Messiah,” the consecrated servant of God set apart for the high purpose of redemption.  Messiah is the One promised long ages ago to the fathers and the prophets.  That He was indeed the Messiah, the Anointed One, Jesus Himself acknowledged in his own home town when, in the synagogue, He applied to Himself and his mission the words of Isaiah:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” things that He assured his listeners were being fulfilled in their very presence, before their very eyes (Luke 4:18-21; see also Isa. 61:1).

By acknowledging this man Jesus as the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, we Christians affirm the divine origin of Judaism.  We acknowledge that through the history and Scripture of ancient Israel God was indeed at work, calling out a chosen people for his purposes, purposes that include, on the one hand, his own entry into human history, and on the other, the blessing of all peoples.  By confessing Jesus as the Christ, we confess the historical, theological, and spiritual bond between the Christian faith and Judaism.  We confess that we ourselves are the spiritual heirs of Israel’s history, its promises, and its hope.  Without an awareness and appreciation of our Jewish roots, therefore, we cannot fully or truly appreciate Jesus the Messiah, the Christ.

Though by calling Jesus the Christ we acknowledge the divine origin of Judaism and connect ourselves to it, we distance ourselves from it at the same time.  For, unlike the Jews, and in concert with the apostles, we proclaim Jesus as Messiah.  We identify as God’s anointed Deliverer that very One who found no room in the inn at his birth, who found no reception in the house of Israel during his years of public ministry, and who was Himself the stone which the builders rejected.  By calling Jesus the Christ, in other words, Christians recognize in Him the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the history of the world, especially as expounded by the apostles and prophets.  We do so not as the Jews, who expected the Messiah but who rejected Christ, or as the heretic Marcion, who summarily rejected the Old Testament and its attendant prophecies concerning God’s Anointed.  Rather, we do so in affirmation of the fact that the work of God in Christ was continuous with his redemptive dealings for all mankind from the very beginnings of the world and beyond.  The incarnation was not, as it were, an ad lib or random event.  It was no accident.  It was the result of centuries of preparation, both inside Israel and outside.  The coming of Messiah was something God willed from before the worlds were made, and it happened in fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to his people, at a time when all things were ready and the world was ripe (Gal. 4:4).  Neither our redemption nor our Redeemer are a mere afterthought.  He is the faithful fulfillment of God’s earnest pledge to Israel and, in turn, to us.  Messiah is the One in whom history finds its consummation and meaning, the One for whom the world has been prepared and toward whom it is providentially moving.

In the light of the New Testament, we now realize that the Messiah for whom Israel waited was greatly misunderstood.  Many Jews expected a national hero, a king, a great warrior, another Judas Maccabeus.  Others expected a supernatural harbinger of the world’s impending demise.  In Jesus they got Someone who was all these things and none of these things.  What they got was Isaiah’s suffering servant, a Messiah who conquered by dying and who healed our anguishes with his own, and a preacher of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus frequently tried to distance Himself from the misguided messianic speculations of his age and from the hopes that the combination of those notions and his public ministry sometimes excited.  Not that He rejected the messianic hope; He certainly did not.  But He seems intentionally to have distanced Himself from the peculiar shape it took in his day.  As God’s Anointed One, Jesus knew better than his over-zealous followers just what the Messiah’s saving work entailed and what it did not.

But some understood.  Simeon and Anna, it seems, had a deeper and clearer comprehension of the Messiah than did many of their contemporaries.  So also did John the Baptist.  Unlike others, they recognized God’s Anointed when, at last, He appeared.  They knew He had to suffer in order to conquer.  They understood that Israel’s Messiah was not interested in Israel only.  God’s intention for his Anointed One was global.  His purpose was to distribute the healing balm of Gilead as far as the curse of Adam is found.  God’s purpose in creation always was to gather all things together in Christ, for the Messiah is the focal point, the center of gravity, for the entire universe.  He is the one under whose authority all things shall be placed and by whom all things, even now, hold together (Heb. 1:13; Col. 1:17).

By confessing Jesus as the Christ, the candidate for baptism gives voice to the oldest and most natural confession of Christians, one that Peter himself declared first to Jesus (Matt. 16:16) and repeated later to the Jews at Pentecost, a declaration that contains virtually all we speak of here:  “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).

The combination of Hebrew name and Greek title in the creed are indicative of the universal scope of Christ’s significance, encompassing as it does Jews and Gentiles alike.  In Jesus Christ, church and synagogue stand side by side, the history of the former being the theological and spiritual legacy of the latter.

To go on, this Jesus of Nazareth, this wanderer through ancient towns and villages, this traveller of dusty roads, this penniless, wayfaring preacher, this condemned man whom the grave itself could not hold, is God’s own Son.  Jesus the Christ is also Jesus the Son of God.  By saying so, the creed follows the form of Peter”s great confession:  “You are the Christ,” Peter said to Jesus, “the Son of the living God.”  For these words Christ pronounced Peter blessed and assured him that his confession of faith was divinely precipitated (Matt. 16:16, 17).  By following Peter’s lead, the candidate for baptism attests that what Jesus is as Messiah He is also as Son of God — the transcendent object of our faith and worship.  Christ is the end toward which all things move and the Redeemer who makes that movement possible.  For us, God’s only Son is God’s gift (John 3:16).  

When we call Jesus the Son of God, we do not mean that his relationship to the Father is the same as our own.  The Church believes, and the creed affirms, that Jesus’s relationship to the Father is unique.  Hence the creed’s word “only” (“unicum”), which seems to build on the notion that while our relation to the Father is that of adopted children, Christ’s is sui generis because it is, so to speak, natural.  He is the Son of God in a way we never could be.  By the word “only” the creed sets Christ apart from us, his adopted brothers and sisters, as well as from all other things.  In other words, while God has many adopted children, He has only one natural, or begotten, Son.  This distinction between us and Christ is more explicitly articulated in the Nicene Creed, which declares that the Son was “begotten, not made.”  The theological significance of that distinction is remarkably far-reaching, as the following analogy helps to illustrate. 

That which a man makes is not a man.  A man can make a chimney, a bird feeder, a rowboat, a compass.  A man can even make a painting or a statue of a man.  But while all of these things might be useful to a man or might even resemble a man, none of these things is a man.  The creation of human persons is the result not of making but of begetting.  What a man and woman beget is a human, as fully human as the parents who begot it.  The same principle holds true for God (in fact, it holds true for us only because it derives first from Him).  What God makes is not God.  God makes all things, from atoms to aardvarks to archangels, none of which is God.  But what God begets, unlike what He makes, is God.  God the Father has begotten only one Being in or out of the universe:  the Son.  The Son, like his Father, is truly God.  The Begotten is as divine as the Begetter.  Just as a human child shares its parents’ human nature, the Son of God shares the nature of his Father, and that nature is divine.  Therein lies the great difference between the Son and us:  He is begotten; we are made.  We are, like our Savior, the children of God.  But among the children of God, the Son is utterly unique.      

But that uniqueness does not mean He is no example of the sort of children we ourselves ought to be.  As God’s Son, Christ was not at all wayward.  He was a Son who, in every respect, was what He should be.  On earth, in a human life, He was the perfect expression of the sort of people we ought to be and of the way we ought to relate to God.  That fact seems lost on too many of us, however, and we seem unwilling to let Jesus be Jesus.  We desperately and foolishly try to reshape Him for modern consumption, both within the Church and without.  When we do, we are wrong.  As Dorothy Sayers so trenchantly observed,

“Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.  If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven before them.  If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him?  We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly.  Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ” (Sayers, “The Dogma is the Drama,” 26).

Just as the the word “Father” in the creed’s first article is no mere metaphor of human paternity, so the word “Son” here is no mere metaphor of human sonship.  Neither the divine paternity nor the divine sonship is an instance of human relationships, in general, or of male functions, in particular, foisted onto God.  Both are matters of divine revelation, not human projection.  This insight regarding Christ’s sonship, of course, is not new.  Theologians have insisted upon it for centuries.  As Rufinus observed more than a millennium and a half ago, “When you hear the word ‘Son’ you must not think of a nativity after the flesh” (Rufinus, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, 546).  To do so, to think of such language as but human relationships imposed onto God by his creatures, is not simply to misunderstand Scripture, it is to devalue the revelatory, and therefore authoritative, character of both Scripture and the incarnation, which together insist, like the tradition that builds upon them, that Christ was God’s Son, not God’s child, as some would have us think. 

In the New Testament, when used by Christ, the word “Son” seems to point to his unique and intimate relation to the Father; when used about Him by others, it seems often to be a messianic title in reference to his divine origin, his divine mission, and his divine nature, not a chauvinistic hijacking of the incarnation by ancient males for their own gender-specific advantages.  The word “Son” implies that in Jesus we see the full expression of the Father’s love and glory, and that we see it in One who is in no way less divine than the One who begot Him and who sent Him.  Christ’s sonship, furthermore, is not a thing to be guessed at.  Rather, it is a matter of divine demonstration.  As Paul explained, Jesus Christ was “designated Son of God” by the display of divine power exercised in his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:4).

As noted earlier, the Apostles’ Creed lacks the elaborate Christology of the other major creeds.  Unlike the Nicene Creed, which goes on to affirm, among other things, that Jesus was born from the Father before all ages, was light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, and was of one substance with the Father, the Apostles’ Creed affirms only that Jesus, the man of history, is not only the Christ and God’s Son, He is “our Lord.” 

Even though it is surpassingly brief on this point, the Apostles’ Creed, properly understood, affirms no less concerning Christ’s deity than do the more elaborate and technical creeds, for if Christ is not God, to believe in Him, to worship Him, to call Him “our Lord,” as the Apostles’ Creed teaches us to do, is rank idolatry.  Christ’s sonship and lordship, as they are expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, must be understood monotheistically, especially because such affirmations imply Deity.

Seen in conjunction with our previous affirmation that Christ is God’s Son, to call Him here “our Lord” is to articulate the humanward dimension of Jesus’s two-sided relationship:  He is uniquely related, on the one hand, to the Father as Son and, on the other hand, to us as Lord.  If calling Him God’s “only Son” serves to distance Him from us, to call him “our Lord” serves to connect us indissolubly both to Him and to his will.  He is God’s Son; He is our Lord.  As both Son and Lord, Christ is the agent of divine rule in Heaven and on earth.  All authority, both here and there, is his.

To call Him Lord is perhaps the most characteristic utterance of one under the influence of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3).  But to say so publicly was also one of the most profound and far-reaching choices with which the earliest Christians were confronted: “Kyrios Christos” (Christ is Lord) or “Kyrios Kaisar” (Caesar is Lord) was the choice set before them.  In their recitation of the creed, the ancient candidates for baptism declared their answer, as do all today who follow in their train.  Thus, from the very beginning, confessing Christ as Lord has been the very essence of Christian faith.  Historically and theologically, the confession of Christ as Lord is the bulwark of our religion.  Even the angels themselves proclaimed it on the first Christmas (Luke 2:11).  So also did Paul and his colleagues, when they were dragged before the authorities (Acts 17:7).  It was Paul’s custom to teach that someone other than Caesar was Lord.  That Someone was Christ.  Paul seems to have understood that to declare Christ as one’s own Lord is a liberating declaration.  Whoever confesses Him is no longer bound to any earthly master.  It was a lesson Paul never forgot, for even as an aged man, imprisoned for his faith and with little expectation of release, he could call Christ the King of kings and the Lord of lords (1 Tim. 6:15). 

To identify Christ as “our Lord” is, of course, to attribute to Him perhaps the very highest of all titles, especially because this title was used of the Supreme God in the Old Testament.  It also is a title Christ Himself owned and accepted:  “You call me Lord and teacher, and you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13).  Of course, while his lordship is something we must and do acknowledge, it is not dependent upon that acknowledgement.  He is Lord whether it suits us or not, and whether we confess it or not.  His lordship depends not upon us, but upon Him.           

Theologically, his lordship is all-inclusive.  The scope of Christ’s lordship is not restricted by time, by geography, or by power.  It admits no exceptions.  As Karl Barth so aptly expressed, “The New Testament has left no doubt as to the fact that there is only one Lord and that this Lord is Lord of the world” (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 93). 

Christ is Lord of the world, and though the world does not yet confess that awesome fact, someday it shall (Phil. 2:9-11).  Before Him every knee one day shall bow.  This does not mean that the world can make him Lord; it cannot.  That has been done.  But the world can, and it shall, acknowledge that reality, to the glory of God the Father.  No dimension of human life falls outside his dominion — not our minds, not our hearts, not our consciences.  He is Lord of all.  Everything, without exception, shall be publically and perpetually subjected to Him.  No portion of human existence remains autonomous, or is exempt from his authority.  He holds sway over the universe, all of it.  Nowhere can one find a hiding place, a Christ-free refuge.  Because Christ is Lord of all, nothing is properly secular. 

Christ’s inclusive lordship entails ownership, mastery and divinity.  It includes the prerogatives of commandment and of judgement.  By declaring Him our Lord, therefore, we acknowledge our duty to reverence Him, to obey Him, and to fashion our lives and our world into harmony with his will.  Only thus do we properly acknowledge the universal dominion that is rightly his, and which awaits universal acknowledgement.  He has the right to rule us.  We have the privilege and the responsibility to obey.  In other words, Christ is not simply my Lord, or even the Christian Lord.  He is not even the greatest Lord among many lesser lords.  He is the one Lord, the Lord of all (1 Cor. 8:6).  We must learn to regard Him and to respond to Him as He really is — Supreme Ruler over all things.

Here, if I may venture a guess, is where Christians most often fail.  We call Christ the King of kings and Lord of lords; we say He has the name that is above every name, but we do not obey Him.  He, in turn, asks, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46).  To such a devastating question there can be no adequate reply.  To neglect Christ and his commandments and then to call Him our Lord is to lie.  As our Lord, Christ has standardized life for us.  “His will,” says Bishop Westcott, “is the law of our action” (Westcott, The Historic Christian Faith, 52).  His lordship requires more than our enthusiastic or heartfelt endorsement; it demands our obedience.

Finally, in a creed like this, which begins with the very personal words, “I believe,” any movement away from individual to corporate acknowledgement is especially significant.  The identification of Christ as “our” Lord is just such a movement.  He is not merely my Lord, though He is that; He is our Lord.  His lordship is one of the creed’s community considerations, balancing its individualistic concerns.  Our obedient acknowledgement of Christ’s lordship, in other words, is not something we do in isolation.  Only in conjunction with our Christian brothers and sisters now, and with all the world later, can we confess the lordship of Christ according to the pattern set for us in the Apostles’ Creed.

“...no stone of my life will remain on another once I experience who he is.  No one who has met him can go away the same.”
—Helmut Thielicke, I Believe

“You believe in God, believe also in me.”
—John 14:1

date modified:
6 July 2006