In the earlier parts of the Creeds, we profess our belief in God, the Father and Creator, his only begotten Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, the Counsellor who gives us life. We then go on to proclaim our faith in the Holy Catholic church, and finally to the means of grace that will sustain us to the end. The last section in the Creeds deals with forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body and the life hereafter. Apostles’ Creed goes: [I believe in...]
the communion of saints the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting
while the Nicene Creed has:
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.
The ‘communion of saints’ is only mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed. Of the several interpretations existing, the traditional one is that it means ‘the spiritual union existing between Christ and every Christian, and therefore between Christians whether in Heaven or on earth. When I have lost someone special to me, who had a strong faith, the belief in the communion of saints has been a huge comfort to me. The knowledge that I am standing alongside the saints in worship and prayer, especially intercessory prayer, is most valuable to me. It is not clear why it is not mentioned explicitly in the Nicene Creed.
As we have seen in earlier sections, the Nicene Creed is more expansive in general: so here we believe not just in the forgiveness of sins, but we ‘acknowledge’ that there is one baptism, through which comes forgiveness. What do we understand by the forgiveness of sins, I wonder. It is a concept Dr Rowan Williams described as equally difficult to believe in as the Virgin birth or Resurrection.
Baptism has been treated as the sacramental rite that admits believers to the Christian Church and practised since Apostles’ time. The baptism of Jesus himself, and his conversation with Nicodemus about regeneration through water and the Spirit’ was no doubt why it became an initiation rite in the early church. Acts of the Apostles cites several instances where the baptism was in the ‘name of Jesus Christ’, but by the Third Century when the Creeds were being formulated, baptismal vows included belief in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The emphasis on ’one’ baptism is also interesting and was historically significant because re-baptisms were occurring too often in the early church. Most mainline Christian churches now recognise each other’s baptisms So, while someone from one church might be inducted into another, there is no re-baptising.
There is another question about the phrase, ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’; and this is where the Nicene expansion of the concept can lead to more confusion than clarity. Do we mean that once you are baptised, all your sins are forgiven for ever? To quote St Paul, “Shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase?” Paul answers the question himself: “Certainly not! How can we who died to sin [through baptism] live in it any longer?” The Apostles’ Creed leaves us more room to interpret forgiveness as a gift of God given graciously to those who repent of their sin and seek his forgiveness.
We ‘believe in the resurrection of the body’ or ‘We look to the resurrection of the dead’: another fundamental part of our belief. Jesus‘ own message to his disciples was that he himself will rise from the dead, and that he is going to prepare a place for us also so that we could be with him. Indeed, the belief that at the “’second coming of Christ’ departed souls will be restored to a bodily life and the saved... will enter the life of heaven is a fundamental element in the Christian doctrine” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Faith, Ed. F. L. Cross).
Since we were created in the image of God, with body and soul, we could understand resurrection to mean a restoration of the body, although most people would wonder about how a reconstruction of the body might actually happen. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (Ch 15) explains that in his view the resurrection will be new and spiritual. The whole chapter is concerned with resurrection: of Christ, and its link with what is promised to us. This has resonances with Jesus’ own retort to those who questioned him about a seven-times married woman and whose wife she would be after resurrection: ‘At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.‘
Both Creeds conclude with our belief in the life to come—which we can lay claim to as believers in Christ. This has been alluded to already while confessing that ‘he will come again to judge the living and the dead’. We hope that the judgement of God will be tempered with his infinite mercy. What ‘life everlasting’ means, we can barely imagine. While we reflect on the Creeds that we use, it is striking that Holy Communion (or the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper), one of the central sacraments of the churches that say the Creed, does not get a mention in them.
So we come to the end of our look at the two most commonly used forms of the Creed, by which we remind ourselves about our core beliefs week by week. This is how we earth ourselves in our common beliefs which at least partly hold us together.
Comments