by Don Palmer
There is great wealth in being a creedal church. Our creeds—the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed—are historically validated statements of belief. “Credo”, “I believe”. They have been described as “expository distillations of Scripture”, and go back to the very early days of the Church. We are called upon to witness our faith. The creed is one of the several ways that we do this.
Assertion of belief begins in Scripture; for instance, the Ethiopian, converted by Phillip, exclaims “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” The Apostles’ Creed was formulated very early and has always been used as a statement of faith at Baptism. We don’t know the authorship of the Apostles’ Creed, which is used with only slight variation throughout Christendom.
In Nicea, presently a town in Turkey, a church council formulated a somewhat amplified statement of belief, the Nicene Creed, in 325 AD. We use both creeds, the Nicene Creed in the service of Holy Communion, and the Apostles’ Creed in the Baptismal Office, and in Morning and Evening Prayer.
The creeds’ importance lies in many areas, among them their being a kind of road map of the teachings of the Bible. They respect Christ’s admonition to be witnesses of the faith that is within us. The creeds, by their very history and integrity, protect the Church against heresy. They afford us worshipping Christians comfort and solidarity as we as a body make the creedal statements in His Church. As their history records, they are major tools in Christian education.
There are dissidents. Behind rallying cries of “No creed but Christ” and “No creed but the Bible” are denominations which in a distorted and fearful way look upon the creeds as heavy-handed dogmatism. (The Baptists, a major force in the dissidents, have nevertheless recently adopted a very severe “Faith and Message” which is non-voluntary, and has created a near-schism in their church.) The noncreedal churches fear that creeds violate free faith, contradict voluntarism, subjugate liberty of conscience, etc. One group accuses the creedal churches of elevating the Apostles’ Creed to the 67th, and most important, book of the Bible! We believe their accusations are flawed.
I find great strength and companionship as I recite “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth……..” and thus unite with Christians in the past, present, and future.
