The best summary of the core teachings of the Catholic Church is found in the Nicene Creed. It was crafted in ancient Christianity and is proclaimed at Sunday Mass. In this series, we’ll be taking a walk through that creed, looking at its elements and unpacking it.
I became a Christian with the help
of a small group of non-denominational believers on my college dorm floor who
believed that "the Bible alone" was sufficient to know Christ's
revelation and to live as he wanted us to.
We had a great fear of the word religion.
And creeds seemed to be a dose of religion in chemical purity: an attempt to
put the living God in a box.
The problem came as we tried to
live out the gospel in the real world. As time goes on your prayer group
graduates and tries to become a local church. As it starts to attract a few
strangers from the neighborhood who aren't part of your cozy circle of friends,
things get complicated.
Fairly quickly, somebody asks,
"What do you believe?" and you no longer can rely on a sort of trust
that you and your friends are decent folk who wouldn't believe or do anything
at odds with the Gospel. You have to try to articulate what, precisely, you
believe in a way that is intelligible to somebody who doesn't know you.
And so we found ourselves, a group
of perhaps 30 young adults, huddled in a room with a blackboard, trying to
summarize what we, as Bible-believing, charismatic Christians, believed in: a
"Statement of Faith." It was, in its own way, a hilarious afternoon
(at least in retrospect). The chalkboard was soon filled with different clauses
and points of doctrine, connected in a baffling web of arrows that looked like
a football diagram in a Goofy cartoon. After several
hours, we gave it up as a bad job and went home.
A week or so later, the pastor just
pounded out something on his own typewriter about how we believed in the Bible,
God the Father, Jesus his Son, the Holy Spirit, and about our being a community
of Spirit-filled servants. I thought to myself dimly, This reminds me of
something I've heard somewhere. My lack of familiarity with historical
Christianity had prevented me from having much knowledge of the Apostles' or
Nicene Creeds. I didn't even know Catholics recited the Creed at Mass every
Sunday! When I did discover the Creeds a few years later, it began to dawn on
me that we could have saved a lot of time just copying them instead of
reinventing this wheel with corners on it.
It is worth noting that pagans
didn't have creeds. You don't need a creed for a collection of tales about gods
in Asgaard, Olympus, or the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The myths
of Greece or Rome or the folktales of Germany, Asia, or the Great Plains
required only poets and bards, not creeds. It was only when heaven began to
upset the apple cart by involving itself in the mundane day-to-day events of a
very real group of humans called Israel, whom the Lord God had brought from
Egypt, that something like a creed began to emerge.
Suddenly something had happened,
not once upon a time, but to a specific group of people in history, who lived
at a specific address. Moreover, these people were constantly being pressured
by their neighbors and by their own sinful tendencies to forget what had
happened. And so, their history became one long and careful act of remembering,
not imagining—designed to make sure that their past was not lost.
When the Church began, that need to
remember and summarize what had happened continued. And since what had happened
was so strange—and so fraught with the possibility of being misunderstood in a
thousand ways—the Church also immediately was committed to creating summaries
of the faith that, though initially brief ("Jesus is Lord"), expanded
in length over time to make sure that the broad contours of the basic story and
its meaning were not lost. That's because the central command around which the entire
Church was built was "Do this in memory of me." The Creed keeps our
memory clear.
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