Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Baptism of Jesus, 12^th of January, 2025

The Apostles’ Creed

In the Ordination Charge that ministers receive one of the things the Uniting Church tells us is: ‘You will receive the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as safeguarding and witnessing to the faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, and use them in worship and instruction.’ I have been here for over four years and have hitherto failed to use the Apostles’ Creed in worship and instruction. Today, as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, we will reaffirm our own baptism, including saying the Apostles’ Creed together. So let me use today’s Reflection for ‘instruction’.

One word that might be used to describe the group of us gathered here today is ‘believers’. It is strange to describe the people who follow a particular religion not by what we do but by what we think. It would make more sense to describe religious people as ‘doers’ rather than ‘believers’ since what we do can be experienced by others at first-hand, but no one else can be certain about what it is that we genuinely believe. Christianity is unusual in its focus on right belief or ‘orthodoxy’ over right behaviour or ‘orthopraxis’. Both the other ‘religions of the Book’ put more emphasis on how one behaves than on what one believes. Jews are distinguished by the practice of circumcision and by following the Law, and Muslims follow the five pillars of Islam. Both Judaism and Islam have affirmations of faith that are recited: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ and ‘there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger,’ but it is only Christianity that has creeds. It is only Christianity that puts so much emphasis on believing.

We call what we are going to say later in today’s service the Apostles’ Creed because of a fifth-century legend that before Jesus’ apostles went out to make disciples of all nations they met together and agreed on the elements of the new faith they were going to preach and teach. One version of the legend has each of the twelve contributing a clause. That obviously did not happen, but the legend points us to why the early Christians felt that creeds were necessary. Unlike the parent faith, Judaism, people did not initially become Christian through birth. Christianity was a converting religion; people who had been something else became Christian by learning something new. New Christians had to be taught the faith, and the creeds provided them with a summary of what it was that they were being taught.

The first ‘creeds’ were used in the same way that we use the Apostles’ Creed in the baptismal service. Candidates for baptism would have been asked whether they believed in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit, and would have answered in the words they had been taught. From Christian writings of the late second and early third centuries, we know that when candidates for baptism were asked these three questions their answers included some stereotyped phrases from the early church’s agreed ‘rule of faith.’ The bishops taught the ‘rule of faith’ and it was believed to be apostolic, the faith that was first taught by Jesus’ apostles. When we answer those same three questions in baptismal services today with the words of the Apostles’ Creed, we are doing something that goes right back to the birth of the church, even if the exact words that we use only date back to the fifth or sixth century.

Paragraph Nine of the Basis of Union says of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed that: ‘The Uniting Church receives these as authoritative statements of the catholic faith, framed in the language of their day and used by Christians in many days, to declare and to guard the right understanding of that faith’. Geoff Thompson, who recently retired from Pilgrim College, thinks that ‘framed in the language of their day’ might be better put as ‘responding to the issues of their day.’[1] Each of the clauses of the Apostles’ Creed is responding to a particular controversy.

The Creed starts with God the Father and creation to answer questions like: How many gods are there? Is creation good or bad? Who is this god that Jesus described as ‘Father’? A first-century theologian, Marcion, believed that the Jewish scriptures should be rejected by Christians since the wrathful god described in them just could not be the same as the God of Love revealed by Jesus. Christian orthodoxy rejected this; Jesus’ Father is the God described in the Hebrew Scriptures, the God who created the heavens and the earth and saw that they were very good. (Marcion was eventually excommunicated.) That the God Jesus called ‘Father’ is described in the Creed as the creator of heaven and earth is a response to various other heresies that said either that there was no distinction between God and creation, and so nature could be worshipped, or that the creation was inherently evil and only things of the spirit could be considered good.

The longest section of the Apostles’ Creed answers the question: Who is Jesus Christ? It responds to accusations that Christians worshipped more than one God, or that Jesus was not human. The Roman Empire had long known of and respected Jews as monotheists, worshippers of a single God, and Christians claimed to do the same, but they somehow proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord. As a pagan, Celsus, wrote of them:

If these men worshipped no other God but one, perhaps they would have a valid argument against the others. But in fact they worship to an extravagant degree this man who appeared recently, and yet think it not inconsistent with monotheism if they also worship his servant.[2]

The clauses that deal with Jesus say that he is both fully human, born of a human mother, dying a human death, and fully God, the only begotten Son of the Father. Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, and descended to the dead. These are all things that can only happen to human beings. Then on the third day, Jesus rose again, ascended into heaven, is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and one day he will come again to judge the living and the dead. These things are only appropriate to God. The church was declaring that Jesus is both: fully human and fully God.

The Creed then says that we believe in the Holy Spirit, and in that Spirit’s activities. It is the Holy Spirit who creates the church. The church is holy because it belongs to God; it is catholic, which means universal, because every single Christian is part of the one church. That one church includes not only those who are alive but all those Christians who have ever lived – the ‘communion of saints’. That is all relatively straightforward. But the question of the ‘forgiveness of sins’ was more difficult. Once it became obvious that Jesus was not going to return within a single generation, the early church had to decide whether it could continue to welcome sinners back again, and again, and again. Christians were certain that in baptism their sins were forgiven, but what if they sinned again after baptism? Could those subsequent sins also be forgiven? Eventually, it decided that they could. Failing and falling short will never exclude someone from the grace of God. This is what we are affirming when we say that we believe in ‘the forgiveness of sins’ – that if we sin after our baptism has cleansed us of all our sins we will still be forgiven.

One of the clauses I had the most trouble with when learning the Creed was ‘the resurrection of the body’. I knew that in the past people had thought that cremation was wrong because it destroyed the body that was going to be raised, and I did not want to say I agreed with that. But what this clause is saying is not that the physical body that is buried will rise again. It is that being Christian is not about being separated from creation. We are not being saved from our bodies; like the incarnate Son we are embodied people and we will be saved as embodied people. The Creed does not tell us how that will happen, and the Apostle Paul told the church in Corinth that it is a mystery. (1 Corinthians 15:51-45) Another mystery is the ‘life everlasting,’ which we say we believe in because we believe that in Christ’s resurrection death has been defeated, and through the power of the Holy Spirit what was his has become ours.

The clauses of the Apostles’ Creed make more sense, I think, when we know the questions they are answering. But if the Creed was written to deal with the controversies of the early church, why should we continue to say it millennia later?

One of the reasons that we still say the Apostles’ Creed today, in the twenty-first century, here at the bottom of the world in a country of which those first Christians knew nothing, is that these ancient words remind us that each of us is a member of a church that exists throughout time and space; that as Christians we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. When we recite the creeds we acknowledge that we have things to learn from the past, from what has been said and believed by every other Christian who has ever lived. Each of us needs to make the Christian faith our own and accept for ourselves its truth, but when we do this we do not start from a blank slate. Instead, our slate has the creeds written on it.

The last thing that I want to say about the creeds today is that they are ‘doxological’. Doxology is just a churchy way of saying ‘giving praise’ or ‘thanks-giving’. When we say the Apostles’ Creed together as a community we are not primarily making an intellectual statement; we are glorifying God. It does not matter whether we can intellectually assent to every single clause of the creeds, what matters is whether we are willing to put our trust in the God the creeds describe: Creator, Christ, and Spirit.

But to ensure that no one feels that there is not a place for them in the church if they cannot intellectually assent to every clause of the Creed, and I for one continually wrestle with them, I want us to now stand and sing together the hymn ‘Faith will not grow from words alone’ by Elizabeth Smith. Our faith does not grow from words alone, from proofs provided, scripture known; our faith must feel its way about, and live with question marks and doubt. Let us sing.

[1] Geoff Thompson, “In His Own Strange Way” A Post-Christendom Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union (2018) p. 60.

[2] Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (1991), p 33,