The Creed
We give a public account of our Christian faith. We give reasons in the hope that others will realise that this faith grounds us in the truth and logic of creation, and enables to live in harmony with all creatures in it. The Creed gives us this account. The first of the ten commandments is that we should worship God, while the Creed identifies for us the God who is to be worshipped.
4.1 Our Public Statement of Faith
We say the creed together in unison in each church service. We read the Scripture and give long recitals of the narrative of God’s saving acts, and we give this short summary of that narrative, and we give many brief acclamations that summarise our faith in a single line. By saying the creed, we offer a single unchangeable and non-negotiable account of our faith, and by doing this, we remain catholic and apostolic and prevent ourselves from veering from the truth.
The creed is a record of the faithfulness of the early generations in fending off all the forces that want to bend Christian witness into pagan shapes, and which try to replace the truth with imitations of it. They were all intended to undermine the incarnation and overwrite the revelation of the truth of God’s dwelling with man that the incarnation brought. They want to negate the challenge to the self-appointed divinities and so to maintain the hierarchy in which those at the top have all power and authority, while the powerless remain at the bottom where they are no threat.
Many powers and spirits try to control us. We can resist them, when we receive power to do from God. We can remain independent of all forces when God makes us so. The pagans who are bound by fate and driven by their resentments to their ancestors, and since they don’t have a choice, they have experience of hope are freedom, and so no gratitude. The gospel must always be stated and expounded again in order to pass the gospel on to each generation. Faithful theology must be set out in the face of faithless theology. As it was in the first centuries of the Church, so it must be in the twenty-first century.
4.2 We believe in God
I believe in one God, the Father the Almighty…
We believe in God. God is first. We are second to him. God calls us to be his second, and so he honours us.
Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen …
God is the creator of all things. Creation is his act of hospitality to us. It is the good place in which we can meet, grow and live. In Christ God took flesh, showing that our created materiality is good, and redeeming it so it become glorious.
Creation is not an unfortunate lump of evil material within which each of is trapped and from which we have to free ourselves. Material is not evil. The world is not a mistake. The materiality of the cosmos does not impose limits on what God can achieve with it. He is its supreme commander. All creation obeys him, though we do not see that obedience is complete yet.
The gospel declares that there is such a love that brings God right up close. In the incarnation God appears to give himself away utterly to everything that dishonours him. No other religion or philosophy concedes this. Cultures not shaped by Christianity believe that man is unworthy of God, and that it is not in God’s nature to take any interest in man, and that God cannot endure a relationship that is so ungodlike and so unworthy.
The powerful of earth tell us that God does not make himself known to men, and that God himself could never come close to us. A very few men may raise themselves, for a while, but they will inevitably fall again. A few may be exalted to the position of gatekeepers, in a properly pious cult, that intends to preserve the heavens from contamination. The most philosophical expressions of other traditions insists that men are wretches, who cannot and should not be associated with what is precious. They say that they alone can be mediators and go-betweens between God and the poor. All who believe themselves worthy consider us unworthy. When you add to this incarnation the news of the cross and passion of our Lord, the offence becomes even deeper. The news of Christ is always controversial and contested. Every regime understands the threat to its authority.
Much human art and culture represent our refusal to believe in this love, our wish to hide from it and decide that such love is not possible, and such a vast hope may not be permitted. Some would rather not take the risk than face such crushing disappointment. Some would rather believe that God is a sadist than that he loves us as he says he does. Some believe that their ability to defy him and insist on their own awfulness, is stronger than God’s ability to love them. Pessimism and fatalism are given until the appearance of the gospel, and every act of Christian witness must be pushed upstream against them.
We believe in one Lord. Jesus Christ, the only Son of God…
Man is not brought too near to God; by being brought near to God his identity is secured, not endangered. God is not threatened by the new proximity of man. Man does not bring anything additional, either good or bad, to God. Man neither adds nor subtracts in this relationship. God is not glorified when man is abased or crushed, cast off or ignored.
We can consider everyone and everything when we concede that they are creatures of God, each given their own dignity, each knowable within their own set of relationships, in the light of the Jesus Christ.
Eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, Through him all things were made…
The Father makes himself known to us through his Son, who is of one being with the Father. The phrase, secured by the council of Nicaea, ‘of one being (homoousion) with the Father’ is the confession that fastens man to God. Now we may no longer understand ourselves in any other way than as God’s man. The true God is God-with-man.
All Christian theology is set out in debate with those who want to take God away from man and from creation. They say that the Son is not of the same being as the Father, but of lesser being, divine only by association, and immediately new intermediaries appear to fil the gap they have opened between God and man, and they are those intermediaries. As soon as it looks as though they have created a job for themselves, a job of pretending to make the relationship between man and God possible, but by pushing themselves in and attempting to create a gap where there is none, they are attempting to take God away from man, and so hoping to make themselves effectively the only God whom man can know.
This fundamental statement that the Son is ‘of one being’ (homoousion) with the Father is the most succinct expression of the gospel that God is with man as the Father is with the Son. Any departure from this homoousion, is a reversal of the gospel that it is really God who has brought man into communion with himself. The unity of Father with Son, is the unity of God with man.
When God is with man, man is with man. When God is with man as his companion. Companionship flows from God to man, and man can extend this companionship to his fellows. The division and isolation that spreads across humanity is halted and turned back. Division and death are driven out. The power of homogenisation that reduce the distinctiveness of each person is reversed. No longer is each entity pulled into the collective and finally absorbed back into the ground. Each person is established in their distinctiveness. They will eternally receive their supply of life, of companionship, of freedom and holiness. Communion and unity bring reconciliation and integration.
The Western conception of God has never been adequately informed by Christian teaching about the incarnation, so it deist rather than Christian. Without the fully Christian doctrine, set out in this creed at Nicaea, the implicit conceptuality of the West assumes that God and man are two monads, units defined in opposition to one another, each fundamentally without communion or communication with anything other than itself. Whatever relationship between them is at most distant and brief.
The Christian concept of God comes with an equally distinctive concept of Man. Man is the secret of God. God is the secret that only God can make known and does make known. In coming to know this secret man comes into his own true existence. In revealing himself, God both reveals man and calls into being the man he reveals.
By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became Incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.
The Lord took human flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, because he has taken on our flesh. He has made himself visible, audible, and tangible to us in the same way we are to one another. He has a body just as we do, and so he made himself perceptible to us. He clothed himself in what is created so he can be seen by people like us.
The Holy Spirit gave him to us, asking Mary, one member of the people of Israel to act for the whole people in hosting the Lord in her own body. He took her flesh, a sample of the flesh shared by all of us.
The true and only knowledge of man is as God’s creature and companion. God loves man and has united man to himself. The inexhaustible and unknowable has made himself known, to us. Man may not be known apart from God. God may not be known other than as God who has united man to himself. This achievement must be maintained against the intellectual and ideological pressures around us that intend to divorce God from man, cast man off from God, and tell us such love and union are impossible, and that man is never the worthy recipient of it. God does not enter the circle of the universe. All theist and atheist protests against the outrage of the incarnation and against the audacity of the Christian revolution that express it, are a refusal to take this love as given and receive this communion opened up to us.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried…
To those appalled by the Lord’s association with those who are unclean and unworthy and by his passion and death the gospel is offensive. It is fear of the cross and suffering that makes us reluctant to concede that God has joined himself so irrevocably to our destiny. They represent the end of the attempt by any political or religious elite to raise themselves above all others, act as mediator, and so to promote themselves into a junior God, a second besides God. They persecute us when we contradict them.
On the third day he rose again from the dead according to the Scriptures…
Christ took on all that death could inflict, and withstood it, and broke the power of death.
God himself is our mediator. The hierarchies that claim to be our way to ascend towards perfection are now redundant and their power over us is broken. The layers of priestly middle men are dismissed; our political class has lost its hold over us.
God is entirely at home in the creation of his own making. Nothing about it manages to repel him. In Christ, God knows the full range of human experience, and of human degradation endured in the passion and crucifixion.
The resurrected Christ underwent the incarnation and passion. The glory and power of God is demonstrated in that the Son of God took on all the constraints of a creature, and within them, continued to display that same glory and power. This weakness taken on in the incarnation and passion is evidence of the power of God. The incarnation, passion and crucifixion are the work of the resurrection, which demonstrates that Christ always acted freely.
Christ did this ‘according to the Scriptures…’ in fulfilment of the covenant and completion of the promises given to Israel. The people of Israel are witnesses of the long and patient approach of the Lord to man, and the record of the patriarchs, prophets and people is available is given to us in the Old Testament.
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God…
Jesus Christ is the truth about mankind. He is the true man who now sits at the right hand of the Father. The truth of us is there where he is. In him, man is already united to God and no power is strong enough to take us away from God.
Since man has this future, he is not entirely knowable. Man cannot utterly know man, and thus he is not the object of our control or domination, and our attempts to do so are not only totalitarian but futile. Man belongs to God, who secures his identity forever.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end….
God is able to bring judgment and forgiveness and to supply grace. God will establish the truth, and enable a society to investigate so that the truth of any crime or loss is made public adequately, so that that society is satisfied, and the process of reconciliation can start. These processes of judgment and reconciliation are begun, but they are not made complete. What that judgment will be, and what is eventually required to bring justice and reconciliation is not yet known. We look forward to Christ’s coming to establish the truth and to make bring justice complete. The society that is convinced that the process of justice has begun and that it will be completed, will be able to endure the present losses and injustice; it will live in hope and expectation.
The fundamental act that establishes human freedom, and with this freedom, establishes humanity, is that we defy the powerful. We do this by declaring in public that the powerful are accountable to God, and to us and to all men. All of us are responsible and accountable, the powerful just as much as we are. None of us can put ourselves beyond accountability. We insist that there is truth and generosity and justice, and there are long-developed codes which enable us to say what is good and true and just. These allow us to challenge one another and hold one another to account. This code is given to us in Christian teaching and in the culture, morality and law that that have developed through each nation’s reception of that Christian teaching.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified…
The Holy Spirit anoints Christ, and brings us to him, making us the Lord’s people, the body of which Christ is the head. The Spirit is the anonymous servant who brings us together, hosting and enabling each of our relationships, who is able to bring good out of every encounter, who mediates between us all, who gives us power, by reinforcing us with the whole company of heaven, so we act in concert with them and their act is our act, and so making us social and gregarious. The Holy Spirit brings us out of ignorance, confusion and silence to recognise, give thanks and worship the Lord, and so grasp and articulate the whole truth, and to break out of delusion and confinement into the glory he has prepared for us, and so to become free and joyful.
The Holy Spirit makes us the people of Christ, members of his holy company. Without constant infusion of fellowship from God, man defines and identifies himself solely in contradistinction to others. He cannot say what he has in common with them and he cannot provide it. This commonality must arrive from outside, from some third party.
Between every two persons, there is a third, the Holy Spirit. He is that self-effacing servant who makes it possible for each two beings to come together, acknowledge one another’s distinctiveness and become reconciled to each other. He is our interpreter and mediator, the supplier of what each of us needs in order to endure the other. The Holy Spirit continually provides the holiness that makes possible a society of persons, distinct from one another yet compatible with one another.
Who has spoken through the prophets
The long experience of the people of Israel, recorded in the Scriptures and passed down to us, tells the Lord was already on his way. He foresaw what was coming, and through his witnesses he warned us of the opposition he would receive, so that the Old Testament tells us about the cost of our salvation. The Lord long anticipated what he would suffer at our hands, and yet went through this horror for our sake.
I believe in the One, holy, catholic and apostolic church…
The fundamental act that establishes our freedom is the gathering and worshipping of the Christian community shaped by this revelation and this teaching. This community is making a public stand. It is a public manifestation of what is true, good and right. It is not only stating the limits of the claims of the powerful to determine what is true, that is to place themselves above what is true, so the truth is no more than whatever they state.
But when the communion of saints meets, they demonstrate the authority of God over all the powers of dissolution. every Christian gathering is a reconciliation, an integration of what was otherwise fragmented and partial.
The Church is the bringing together of the implausible, the unlikeliest of the manifestation of the reconciling of irreconcilables. As they stand there, together, opposites brought face-to-face in, former antagonists, and as they remain publicly together in peace, they display that message. The proximity to one another in which they stand itself indicates the truth of what they say. moreover, they not only say this, but they say it together, so one voice does not dominate while the many are silent, but all voices are heard. Moreover, they do not merely say this, but they sing it, and so they harmonise, each adjusting their words and tone to blend and complement the singing of the others, to amplify and affirm what their leaders say and sing, and so their voices together represent the harmonisation of creation.
Jesus Christ makes himself available to us in the public worship of the Christians that gather in each city. This body is the particular, gentle form in which he makes himself known.
Christ makes his people one indivisible whole, and the Church is this future whole, making itself present to us in time. God sends us instalments of this whole which make it publicly present within the world, in the communion of this people. The Holy Spirit holds the disparate community of the Church together as this one body.
Saints are those whom God has made holy so that they may be our companions on our journey with the Lord to God the Father. We are not divided from them by death. the world is full of people we don’t see. But we may yet see them. We may see them when we become holy enough to do so.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come…
We enter the holy community through baptism, by which we die to the world and are incorporated into Christ’s passion and death. The truth stands whilst falsehood rages all around it. As we are baptized into the truth, we are immersed in this turmoil, and must now live in the middle of a battlefield. For the truth is to be declared and made public and protected from those who oppose it and want to crush it. This is the vocation of the Church, the community called together by God in order to be witnesses who through the constant public iteration in their worship, state and re-state the truth, broadcasting what would otherwise be suppressed.
The Church is always there. Regimes try to assimilate it, but it cannot be assimilated. It is not only the one counter-culture that survives, but the survival of any culture depends on it. The church’s public act of worship penetrates what might otherwise be complete gloom. That worshipping assembly only needs to be stubborn. The representatives of the regime can ridicule, ostracise and ban the church yet still it is here. And just by continuing to be here, those two or three who gather infuriatingly show them the limits of their power.
As long as any society is vaguely aware that there is this other culture, offered by the Church, this community within the community of the nation it lives on. The best thing for any culture is that it acknowledges that there is this other culture, that cannot be assimilated, that is ancient, and that remains and continues to say now what it has always said, over many centuries. The presence of the Church shows the leaders of that nation the limits of their reach, and so indicates that there are indeed limits, and that the nation is healthy when it acknowledges these.
Christians say that there is a reservoir of generosity, which we can tap. There is a supply we can draw on, and a delivery of fresh generosity can get us out of difficulty. These moral resources include the means by which damage can be repaired and relationships restored so that life may continue. We insist that the truth may not be controlled or suppressed, but there must always be the possibility of public discovery of truth, a process of acceptance by all parties, and time for that process. There must be confrontation, accusation, judgment, confession, penitence, and punishment. There must be public discussion of restitution. We can do better than resort to collective punishment or appeasement. With enough honesty we can probably identify who is responsible and to punish the right individuals.
Any society formed by Christian culture shares the assumption that when there is political or financial disaster, we need not stay paralysed. Fresh generosity can make good shattered relationships. We are not obliged to go round and round over the same terrain, making the same mistakes and never learning from them. There is not only the present, but there is also the future.
The Christian insistence that God is able to provide what we cannot, and that we can appeal to him for more generosity to get us out of trouble, is enough to keep our moral economy partly open to what it has never yet experienced. The future could be larger and more generous than the present. Since there is generosity, there is also hope. Since there is hope, there is the possibility of a world to come.
4.3 The Impossibility of Man without God
The doctrine of God is the source of the doctrine of man. The doctrine of man cannot be separated from the doctrine of God. Man exists among men. Each man is one among many, who lives among responsive beings, whom he recognises and who are able to recognise him for what he is. He is able to give them this recognition only because each of them receives recognition from the source that is prior to all of them. Their circle is sustained by the life it receives from the being who is outside it and prior to it. But when man defies this, withholds acknowledgement from God, denies God, and attempts to be the source of his own being, he attempts to wrest life from those around him. Without acknowledgement of any reciprocity, no man can let any other man be, or concede him his own independent existence. Each wants the other to be only what fits the man who considers him. Without God, all life is an attempt to exert a relationship that is unilateral and so to dominate one another.
But man may exist and hope to grow to maturity he stands in second place, turned to the one who is there before him. God is first. Whatever is first, is God. God is the basis on which there may be more than one, and on which there may be many. The priority of God is the basis on which there may be anything and everything. God makes it possible for each thing allows and enables it to be not-God, distinguishable from God, a distinct being. Man is second to this first. If man is first, nothing follows him or can exist distinct from him – all his creations are transient, and failing. No resources reach them from man, and so they fail and pass away. Man just does not stand on his own. Western ‘theology’ in which doctrine about (deistically-conceived) God always become secularist, that is, in revolt against Christian witness to God. The West continually lurches into heresies about secularism, in which a some conflict is identified between one group of human beings and another. God makes it possible for each being to recognise and be responsive to other beings, and so to be a person.
Treating other persons as things, that is, as mere functions purely of our own self-promotion and self-construction is the modern mode of life. We do not concede that we are not the first being, and thus we assert that we are alone, and that we must make ourselves alone. We are determined to make ourselves beings without relationship, without a society, without a context, without our place characterised by history or even by the natural world around us. We recoil from them and denounce them. We are averse to everything. We drive ourselves towards greater self-differentiation and separation, towards fragmentation and isolation. The stripping away of all relationships is what modernity is. It is the long cul-de-sac, into which the generations before us have marched us. We flinch and evince before whatever appears in front on us.
But we may avoid the direction taken by our most recent generations, turn around, and retrace our steps and pick up the way taken by much earlier generations, who were content. We need to renounce the aversion and unhappiness, and rediscover the contentment and happiness and transmission and continuity from one generation to the next that can only be found through marriage and family life, and through the Christian culture that turns a society away from this despair and which can supply any society with a forward orientation, with confidence, anticipation and which in the Christian gospel goes by the name ‘hope’. In particular we can resist the stripping of men from women, and women from men, and of parents from children, the stripping of the present generation from the future generation. This stripping is what modernity is. It is a syndrome and a pathology. It is the determination not to acknowledge anything it does not construct. It hates the world it finds itself in, and in its place constructs ‘technology’, by which we attempt to increase the distance between ourselves, repudiate the demands of other people and frustrate their attempt to reach us. It is the machinery of distance-creation, intended to enforce our dominion. It is the determination to reduce everyone to the status of servants, and then assert that we do not rely on them but are sustained sheerly by our own will.
The Western intellectual tradition contains the resources of the apprenticeship by which man can rise to self-mastery. That tradition is which is the accumulated experience and insight of centuries, of those who followed took this course of those who did not. They contain the resources by which man can decide that the apprenticeship has no attractions, that such a course would be demeaning for him. So this apprenticeship can be conceal and so the ways blocked so others never find it.
The education offered by schools and universities is composed of intimations of that apprenticeship, and so it directs us towards self-mastery for ourselves, and so enables each generation to hold together as a society and even to flourish. But they when they offer us only bowdlerised and abbreviated forms of that apprenticeship those educational institutions can also inoculate us against that great tradition, so that we never grasp the vastness of the apprenticeship, or realise that the self-mastery that it makes available, is required for the continuation and flourishing of that society.
But in each generation the elite generation has by attempting to silence the chief proposition of the gospel which is that God holds them to account. God hears the distress of the neglected, of the silenced and the poor. God holds that elite accountable for them.
That elite is determined to conceal from the poor that they can appeal over the heads of their rulers to God, and that God always hears them, and that they are never cut off from him. The elite has no absolute power; it is always on probation. The elite that attempts to conceal from the poor their true dignity, that does not want them to understand that God hears them, and that those who rule over them and belittle and silence them. Such an elite is running out of time. In every act of public worship, the Christian congregation repents on behalf of such rulers and encourages them to make this repentance for themselves.
The rich man says that he does not believe in God. His message is taken up by the entire intellectual class, by university humanities departments and professions. They do not believe God. No, of course not. Their job is to replace God, and so make themselves God, the sole arbiter. They can stand no limits. They must bust them. They must assert their own sheer and limitless will. The job of the department of religion is to root out the heresy that is ‘belief in God’. They are unable to deal with the complexities of life shared with large numbers of other people. They are narcissists and hysterics, who having a breakdown.
The victim is a bully. Those who seek power are the same people that are willing to surrender all their freedom and dignity in exchange for security. But this surrender doesn’t give them security. They are anxious and their fear makes them vengeful. They will take it out on you. They see themselves as victims, and do not want to hear that they are not victims. They find this status comforting, for they want to be able to blame someone else for their misery. They seem to want to be pushed around, and they are amazed that you don’t want to be pushed around. They want to share with you the fellowship of the abused and traumatised. Willingly they surrender their sovereignty. But we cannot do so.
4.4 Rejection of the gospel – the claim of ‘Atheism’
I believe… We believe…
You may become a Christian. You may believe, that is, you may realize that things are as the gospel describes, and it brings with it power to change our minds. This realization may come to you. It can come if you want it. But the Lord takes his cue from you. He will call. If you call back, he will call again. He will step closer only with your consent, at least until the time at which he makes himself known to all.
Our knowledge of God must be a matter of our consent to what the Lord wants to show us, and therefore it is the function of our consent, our faith and readiness to believe. We are not confronted by a revelation that is so indisputable that it takes away our freedom. We can see nothing if we choose.
He could do no miracles there because of their unbelief – They didn’t want what he wanted to give them. They had given up, and though he waited for them to change their mind, they did not. They denied their own need
The question is not whether God exists. The question is not whether there is God. it is whether there is man. God is the condition of possibility of there being man. It is God who brings each man together with and holds them apart, and so sustain their distinctiveness, so that they do not become a sludge. We may become men, and learn about other men, and recognise and honour and respect them, because God enables us to do this. God who is first companion, is the basis of give. He is the fundamental host. There is humanity and there are individual human beings because God makes this so.
The rebellion against God is our rebellion against our own best hopes. This rebellion is conceptual and deep, for the West long ago evacuated the concept of God, by imagining that God is a second god to man. God is a possibility, but man is a certainty, and as such is the judge and criterion of all other knowledge. God is at the edge, man at the center. In Europe Christianity took this hit below the water line four hundred years ago, when there was a Reformation, which was simultaneously a reform of the Church and return to faithfulness, and an overreaching and failure of faithfulness. The Church in Europe went through a Reformation that reformed and renewed. The bad Reformation imprisoned the proclamation of the Church within the bubble which has the individual – or the mind, idea, or the will – at its center ever since. It was a return to a Hellenistic idea of the soul imprisoned in a hostile world, and a step back from the idea of the Church as the gathering of God’s people. The individual was the criterion by which all things are judged, while God was out on the periphery. The implicit corollary later made an explicit claim that there is no God. This means that the term ‘God’ has no meaning, and may not be used, and so ‘God’ is simply the idea that you are not allowed to have, the impermissible thought. This is equivalent to saying that there is no judge, that is, there is no such thing as a judge, and thus that truth is through hostage to the will of the individual, or the political class or the regime. The solitary unaccountable will is supreme. Willpower, or simply power, is all there is. The will of the individual is God. Sheer power is God.
The claim that there is no God, no such thing as ‘God’ or a ‘god’, is simply a universal act of powerplay directed against us, by those who don’t want us to identify the claims they are making as divine claims, and as unjustifiable ones. They want their own claims to without challenge. They do not want us to demand that public justification of their claims. They do not want us to be able to say that they are making absolute and therefore divine claims. They simply do not want to be challenged, and so wish to deny us the conceptuality by which we can do so. The doctrine of God enables us to challenge and demand an account from those who wish to remain unaccountable. We say that no one is unaccountable. They may consider themselves so far above us, and consider us so far beneath them. We reply that they are making a claim to mastery, but their claim is false, but is only an expression of their own misery. They are making a claim to divinity, but no one is divine, except God alone, and God has made himself accountable to us. Only the God who has sent his Son, who took on and now bears our flesh and our humanity, is God. The God of Jesus Christ is the sole mediator for humanity, and who, and in providing for all our needs, is our Saviour. That is the gospel and that is the good news.
