The Need for a Creed

Part 1 of “We Believe: The Nicene Creed”

Nicene-Constantinopolitan-CreedThis week we began the season of Lent—a forty day preparation for Easter and the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus from dead—the most important event in history and the foundation of the Christian faith. In a lot of ways, Lent is about going back to basics: remembering what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and taking some time to consider our response—repentance, belief, and obedience to God.

The thing is, however, we assume that we know the basics of Christian faith—that we have them down pat. We’ve heard it so many times. We’ve recited the creeds of the church over and over again. I know I’ve been doing that since about the 3rd or 4th grade when I memorized the Apostle’s Creed in order to get the coveted Sunday School award. I could say it along with the congregation, but at that time I don’t think I actually knew what it meant. If I knew, I might not have said it…

And that’s because as I have gotten older and studied the Scriptures and the basic beliefs of Christianity, I have come to realize that these beliefs are radically subversive and even dangerous. In the early 1970s in America, saying, “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord” got me a pen and a cookie and an approving look from my teacher; in the first century, that same assertion of belief would get Paul thrown in prison and tortured. I had no idea that what I was saying in the creed was so radical.

It’s still radical, perhaps even more so today than just a few decades ago. We live in a world where beliefs, and particularly Christian beliefs, are under attack. The culture of modern America tends to reflect the post-Christian reality in Europe and elsewhere. It’s a culture that loves to revise history to suit its present agenda; it’s a culture that distrusts institutions and promotes individualism. It’s a culture that values emotions more than words; a culture that seeks the new and novel over and against the old and accepted. It’s a culture in which skepticism and snark gets you a talk show on cable TV (or a shot at being President), and where the only truth is that there is no such thing as truth. In such a culture, belief seems quaint on the one hand or delusionally dangerous on the other.

I see this all the time when I go to a party and people find out I’m a pastor. When someone asks, “What do you do?” and I tell them, they will sometimes physically take a step backwards and screw up their faces. “Really?” they say, as though they have discovered that I have some embarrassing communicable disease. Interestingly, however, I’ve also had similar conversations at clergy meetings. I remember talking a United Methodist clergy colleague at annual conference about the resurrection of the dead. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean you actually believe in all that hocus pocus? I thought you were smarter than that.”

close-to-corinthPaul faced a similar climate in the cosmopolitan ancient city of Corinth, which was kind of like the Las Vegas of the Roman world and, in many ways, a reflection of our own times. Writing to a fledgling church undergoing some real questioning of its faith and practice, and heresies and bad behavior within the church itself, Paul reminds them that knowing what they believe is not only important, but essential. He reminds them of what was of “first importance”—that good news that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was raised from the dead according the Scriptures (I Corinthians 15:1-11). What we have here is a basic form of an early Christian creed. For Paul it wasn’t a mere philosophical argument, an idea to be debated; it was a reality to be lived. It’s a belief that caused a lot of suffering for Paul and yet he never wavered from it. It was belief begun with an encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and yet also handed to him by the very Christians he had previously persecuted and killed. Paul received this heritage of belief, lived it, and passed it on.

As we move toward Easter, celebrating the very same good news that Paul handed on and that was handed on to us by generations of Christians since, it’s important that we examine just what it is that we say we believe—that we not only say it but understand it. that we not only understand it but live it; that we not only live it, but proclaim it.

The vehicle we will use to do that are the creeds themselves, specifically the Nicene Creed, which came together in the early 4th century AD. It wasn’t the first Christian creed, nor would it be the last, but it was the most comprehensive of the earlier statements of faith in the Christian church. It is a creed handed down by some 300 years worth of Christian generations and then has been handed down even more generations to us.

A-Phylactery-being-put-in-place-Western-WallBut before we talk about the creed itself, we need to back up a bit. Contrary to a lot of recent assumptions that the creed was simply invented at Nicea when one faction of Christians outvoted another, the need for a creed actually goes back to the Old Testament. In fact, one of the earliest forms of a creed is found in our lesson from Deuteronomy 6:4-9—the Shema Israel. For thousands of years, Jews have recited the Shema in the morning and in the evening, they have it nailed to the doorposts of their homes in little capsules called mezuzas. Orthodox Jews will literally wear it on their wrists and on their forheads: “Hear, O Israel. The Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

The Israelites lived in a world much like ours where there were enticements to accept the novel and provocative ideas of different cultures and their gods. The Old Testament tells us, however, that one God, the only true God, chose a people for himself to represent him and to be the vehicle through which God would save the world. The Shema defines this God and how he is to be worshipped and is thus a clear statement of belief leading to practice. There are three things that we should note about it as we think about creeds in general:

First, it’s a call for a communal commitment, not simply an individual one. It’s not simply an “I believe,” but a “we believe.” Second, it is exclusive—in contrast to the surrounding cultures, Israel believed in one God, the only God to whom they would give their allegiance. Third, it is also a personal commitment—a commitment to “love” God with the whole self and act accordingly. As Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, “The Shema both defines the one to whom loyalty is given and defines Israel among all the nations by its unique loyalty to this deity.”

It is in the context of the Shema that early Christianity was formed. The first disciples were Jews, as was Jesus. They would have recited the Shema daily. But after following Jesus, seeing him at work, watching him die on the cross and then witnessing his resurrection from the dead, these Jews began to understand the Shema in a new way. The story of God and the story of God’s people had been radically altered by the empty tomb—a new world began in the midst of the old one. The story of God’s redemptive mission through Israel had found its fulfillment in the one who represented Israel as Messiah, but also as God himself. Almost immediately, these Jewish followers of Jesus began to use names for him like Christ (Messiah), Son of God, and—most tellingly—Lord, a name reserved for God himself.

Jesus iconThe New Testament is full of expressions of faith in Christ that appear in the form of early creeds—the earliest of which is “Jesus Christ is Lord.” We already looked at Paul’s summation of the gospel in I Corinthians 15, but notice also Peter’s sermon in Acts 2—“Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” John says at the very beginning of his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Paul recites an early Christian creedal hymn in Philippians 2 which states that Jesus was “in the form of God [but] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” Or again in Colossians 1, where Paul calls Jesus “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for in him all things were created…”

We could go on and on. The point is that from the beginning, Christians have believed that Jesus was, indeed, the same as the God of Israel, and that the Holy Spirit was also part of the godhead. Claiming Christ as Lord and God got them in trouble with both the Romans and their fellow Jews, but they continued to proclaim their belief despite intense persecution.

In the second and third centuries, the church fathers and mothers continued to make similar creedal statements about Jesus, which began the slow movement toward the creeds as we have them today. From Ignatius to Justin Martyr, to Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, we read statements of faith that were clearly incorporated into the creed we said together this morning. When we say these ancient words, we are stepping into a long, historic, and accepted belief about the nature of Jesus Christ. We receive what has been handed down to us.

In every generation, however, there have been challenges to these statements of faith—challenges from those who wanted a Jesus and a creed that more closely matched their culture. Some wanted to separate Jesus from his humanity or his divinity. Some wanted to eliminate the Jewish nature of Jesus and turn him into more of a philosopher. Others in our own time have wanted to separate the historic Jesus from the Christ of faith. As long as Christians have believed the creedal affirmations about Jesus, there have been those who reject them or want to alter them.

In fact, the formation of the Nicene Creed was a response to those challenges. Heresy tends to beget orthodoxy as the church defines down more clearly what it believes. During the first three centuries, Christianity was a scattered collection of small communities undergoing intense persecution. Different nuances of Christian faith developed in those local contexts—a fact we see as early as the letters of Paul, who was constantly trying to keep the churches focused on the essentials.

Nicean-CreedIn the early 4th century, the emperor Constantine came to power and, during a battle, had a vision of the cross with a voice saying, “Under this sign, conquer.” He won the battle and soon decided that Christianity should be the uniting religion of the empire. Since more than 50% of the Roman empire was already Christian by that time, it was a no-brainer!

But with the removal of persecution, soon all of these local factions began to debate with one another about the nature of Jesus. Most of them, having received the tradition of the New Testament and the creedal affirmations of the church fathers, were in substantial agreement. Some, however, continued to press for alternate views. Their debates sometimes became violent, which betrayed their Christian charity. Rather than have these different factions sniping at one another, Constantine decided to draw them together in a great ecumenical council at Nicea, in modern day Turkey, in the year 325. The purpose of the Council was to codify and set down the basics of Christian faith as a way of unifying the church.

I don’t have time to go into all the history of what happened at Nicea—it is fascinating, however, and I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday nights for the Lenten Soup Suppers where we’ll get into that in more detail. Suffice it to say that though the tradition handed down from the apostles won out in the end, it wasn’t pretty. When you have jolly old St. Nicholas slapping heretics in the middle of a church meeting, you might have a problem.

The creed that we have today is thus the product of a lot of experience, thought, debate, and engagement over time. At base, it is a statement about Jesus—who he was and is, and how he relates to God. It’s a statement about the Trinity, a statement about God’s mission in the world, and a statement about who we are to be as God’s people. It’s a shorthand way of describing what is most important and what binds Christians together across time and space.

That’s why we need to study it. In a world of many competing ideas, philosophies, and beliefs, the church needs to once again be drawn back to the basics—to know what we believe about God, but also to learn to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The creed provides us with the basics, but it’s up to us to live them out. As the great missionary E. Stanley Jones put it, “The Christian faith is not a set of propositions to be accepted—it is a person to be followed.” We need the creed to tell us about the Person we’re following.

I am convinced that the only way the church will remain vital in the 21st century is to recapture these basic truths. We are fragmented by many things, torn asunder by debates and schisms. We need to return to the things that really matter. It is our only hope for a renewed unity in faith and mission.

But, perhaps even more importantly, knowing what we believe can enable us to be true disciples of the Jesus—a Jesus who doesn’t fit our agendas, but who invites us to follow him. If Lent is about being more like Jesus as we follow him to the cross, the creed can help us follow him with more clarity and a greater measure of faith. There is something powerful that happens when a church joins together and says with the church triumphant, “We believe!”

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