Creed: One God and Father

The very first words of the Creed are I believe. They are meant to be spoken aloud in public assembly by the Body of Christ, because God is a very public God, offering a public challenge to all the other gods littering the public square.

Most folk in our culture take it for granted that there is only one God. But there's no particular reason that should be the case. Though our ancestors believed in one God as a matter of reason and revelation, the average American believes in one God as a matter of custom and unthinking cultural inertia.

It should be no surprise that some increasingly popular movements are trying to revive polytheism just as popular movements are trying to promote atheism. As such movements arise, the Church goes on saying what God's people have said since Moses: the Lord is one.

Polytheism, the belief in many gods, is really an attempt to chop little godlets out of the one true God. It takes this or that favorite aspect of the divine nature and pretends that's all there is to God. Falsehood and false gods are born when a truth gets ripped out of the whole truth and is taken in isolation.

One of the functions of the Creed is to help us rightly order our knowledge of God. Jesus' ultimate revelation to us is that God is not so much Master, Lord, King, Ground of Being, Author of Creation, or Ruler of Time and Space as he is "my Father and your Father." All these other titles have their place. But the supreme revelation remains that God is Father.

The Creed states that God is Father before it mentions that God is almighty. That's because the fatherhood of God explains what we overlook about his omnipotence. For us, omnipotence is often understood to mean that God is bound to take the path of least pain and is especially bound to see that we do, too.

Psalm 91:1-2 is a favorite of many Catholics: "You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, Say to the Lord, 'My refuge and fortress, my God

in whom I trust.'" We reflexively hear this psalm saying, "If you are right with God, he

won't let anything bad happen to you."

But in this very psalm are the verses the devil used to tempt Jesus to leap off the Temple (with the implication that if God would not save him from pain, he's not much of a Beloved Son). Jesus rejected the lie. He knew that the might of God was not displayed by the absence of suffering. God's might didn't pass around the agony of the Cross. The Almighty was never mightier than when he submitted to death—and conquered it.

Of course, the first great act of the Father's omnipotent power was creation. One implication of the doctrine of creation is that if God wanted to destroy the universe, he would not have to do anything. He would have to stop doing something.

Creation does not just refer to something that happened with the Big Bang. It refers to the fact that the universe—every nanosecond and square millimeter of it—is held in being right now by the present act of God.

God wills you—now. And he does it not out of some need to be entertained, but out of sheer, lavish—one might even say playful—grace. All that exists does so because God loves it into being from nothing and maintains it in being so that it does not lapse back into nothingness.

The Creed also tells us God is the Creator of all that is "visible and invisible." By "invisible," the Church Fathers who struggled with the Creed's language in the fourth century primarily meant what Paul referred to as "thrones, dominations, principalities, or powers" (Col 1:16). It's the whole angelic realm as well as the natural world we see. Everything that exists is made by God, and, therefore, everything is interesting and interrelated.

Catholic theology still is expressed this way today. All things, not just "religious stuff," are fit for us to learn about and to give glory to God for by the fact of their being. For God the Father is the Creator of all things, from Aardvark to Zebra.