The heaven-kingdom’s Keeper

The Creeds and Prayer Book tradition part 1

Candidates for baptism in the days of the early Church were known as catechumens, a Greek word meaning somebody under instruction. For the forty days before Easter which later became the season of Lent, they would robe in white and undergo an intense period of fasting, prayer and learning. This included reading the Scriptures.

St Jerome described the Bible as an “infinite forest of meaning,” and one can readily spend a lifetime exploring its glades and shadows. There the thirsty soul will find living waters aplenty to refresh it. But the woods are thick and rich, and the streams are not always easily found. The forest stretches so far that it is hard to memorise one way around it. Maps are needed to help with navigation.

The Book of Common Prayer offers three such maps, of varying detail, inherited from the common tradition of Holy Church. These are the three Creeds, so named after the Latin word credo, which means “I believe.”

These Creeds are treated with suspicion by some Protestant churches as the traditions of man, as against the inspired words of the Bible. This view is not shared by the Church of England, which receives them as part of the inheritance of the Spirit-guided councils of the early Church, which “may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture” (Article 8). Hence, they are prescribed for our public worship more frequently even than in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches.

1 The Apostles’ Creed

The origin of the creeds is in an ancient “rule of faith” which was learned by heart by catechumens, those preparing for baptism, no later than the second century: that is, within living memory of the composition of the final parts of the New Testament. Easily memorised, the rule of faith gave a short but reliable key for the interpretation of Scripture. This was all the more necessary in the days before books and printing, when the Bible was a large collection of hand-written scrolls, and individual Christians did not own their own copy. Learning the rule of faith helped them to frame the Scripture they heard read out loud in public worship. In due course, given its early origins, this became known as the Apostles’ Creed, summing up the faith Christ bequeathed to the Apostles.

The shortest of the Creeds, the Apostles’ Creed is prescribed twice a day in the Book of Common Prayer, at Mattins and Evensong respectively.

2 The Nicene Creed

The more extensive Nicene Creed is so called because its first draft was approved by a Council, representing all the bishops in Christendom, held in 325 at Nicaea. At the same Council, the heretical teachings of one Arius were condemned, which taught that Jesus was an ordinary human being rather than divine. Hence, the Nicene Creed includes the word “consubstantial,” in Greek “homoousios,” verifying that Christ is of “one substance” with the Father rather than a mere mortal. This word, like the word Trinity itself, is not one that you will find in the Bible. But this is not a strong argument against its use, since until 325, the precise contents or “canon” of the Bible had not been formally ratified by the Church. It is only because we believe that the decisions of these councils of bishops, successors of the Apostles, were guided by the Holy Spirit that we have any reason to believe in the bibles we read today. As St Augustine of Hippo, the great African doctor of the Church, put it, “I would not believe the Gospel unless moved thereto by the authority of the Church.” The same Church finalised the text of the Nicene Creed in 381, at the First Council of Constantinople, in which it condemned the Apollinarian heresy that Christ had neither human mind nor soul, but was little more than a human-shaped puppet for the Divine Word. Orthodox Christianity insisted from the outset that Christ is fully man as well as fully God, a statement finally ratified at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

The Nicene Creed is said on Sundays and every other feast day at Holy Communion, in common with the rest of the Holy Catholic Church, West and East.

3 The Athanasian Creed

The lengthy and theologically complex Athanasian Creed, also called the Quincunque Vult after its first two words in Latin translation, is read publicly at Mattins on certain great feasts of the year, a practice seldom observed these days outside Anglican churches.

If one accepts the inspiration of the Church’s collation of the Bible, it is only consistent also to accept the same Church’s Creeds and doctrine of the Trinity. The precise wording of this doctrine took some centuries of wrestling with heresy to finalise. It did so in the creed later attributed to St Athanasius, whose writings on the Trinity defended the orthodox doctrine from heretical misinterpretation. The Athanasian Creed also explicitly proclaims the true doctrine of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

By the incorporation of this Creed into its public liturgy, the Church of England affirms its claim to represent “the Catholick Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.” At no point has the Church of England suggested that there is any other vehicle of salvation than faith in the Triune God: the Father, the Son and Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

I believe in God the Father

The order of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds reflect the Trinity which they profess. In each, the first paragraph concerns the Father, the second concerns the Son, and the third, the Holy Ghost. This Trinitarian structure reveals who God is and how He relates to His creation, including us. For the purposes of catechesis, following the earliest pattern of the Church we know, we will consider the Apostles’ Creed step by step, beginning today with the Father.

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“Sing,” said the Stranger to the shepherd, “the beginning of things.” And when the shepherd woke, he sang. Verses passed his teeth which he had never heard. Another’s voice sang through him, all the way to Streaneshalch, which we call Whitby now. The monks and nuns there heard the voice and knew it, and welcomed this shepherd into their flock, rude and unlettered though he was. Their Abbess, Hilda, put his inspiration to the test: she spoke to him words of Sacred Scripture and let him rest. When he rose at dawn, the voice buried in his heart sprang forth and turned the plain words into verse:

"Now we must laud the heaven-kingdom’s Keeper,
the Ordainer’s might and his mind’s intent,
the work of the Father of glory:
in that he, the Lord everlasting,
appointed of each wondrous thing the beginning;
he, holy Creator, at the first created heaven for a roof to the children of men;
he, mankind’s Keeper, Lord everlasting, almighty Ruler,
afterwards fashioned for mortals the middle-earth, the world.”

(from Everyman’s Anglo Saxon Poetry, tr. S.A.J. Bradley)

Such was Caedmon’s song. Seven centuries after Christ, fifteen after David, a shepherd like them became the father of Old English verse. He spent the rest of his life in the cloister, imbibing daily the psalms of those older shepherd-bards, the harpist-king and the king of all Creation, who sung and sings still now all things into life and being. His voice joined those all the saints and angels whose cords resound the eternal Word.

“I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth.”

This is the first clause of our creed and of Caedmon’s, and of all the Church throughout the ages. God, yes, we believe in God, of course: but what God? One god among many? An impersonal force that drives creation? A mother god who gave birth to the cosmos from her own being and body? No, none of these things: for God has revealed Himself to us as Father, through His people and through His Son.

As Father, God is first and generative, and there is none prior to Him, nothing to which He is subordinate or bound, nothing with which He can be categorised, nothing among which He can be numbered. When the Scriptures and the nations speak of “gods,” which Christians more habitually call angels and daemons, these are godlike only by analogy to Him, who is the only true God and more than God, beyond God: even, the ancient father who wrote under Dionysius the Areopagite’s name and patronage insists, not God, for what He is exceeds all that we can know or imagine. Not the supreme being, but beyond being, God is the Father to whom all things bear fleeting resemblance, but only humans his image and the potential for likeness to Him. He sits above all “gods,” above the angels and the saints, not among or alongside them.

As Father, God is personal, essentially in relationship to His Son, and by adoption through the Son, in relationship to all his children. Long has the world known Him as Lord everlasting, Ruler and Maker. The Son taught us the closer way: that the children of men may call God Father, too. And as a Father, He has provided for His children this middle-earth to live on, plenty for all to share and feast, but more than that, has made for a lasting, heavenly home.

But as Father, for all His closeness, God is also far. We are not born to Him of flesh, as of a mother’s womb, but of His spiritual seed and mind’s intent. He made us not of Himself but of nothing. God has no body except Christ’s. The womb of man is dust and has no heartbeart for the infant soul to hear. But by God’s grace, we are given for suckling the breast of Mother Church, His Son’s apparelled Bride, and through her, the Cosmos will become Christ’s Body yet, at the end of time. Even then, while we are utterly one with God in Christ the Son, the essence of God as Father will remain beyond us. We will be fully human only when we are fully divine, but God must remain God for there to be any divinity at all.

Hence He has revealed Himself as Father, the Ordainer of all things, personally loving them into being and desiring their good, yet as far beyond them as He is intimately within them: interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, deeper than my innermost being and higher than my uttermost height, as St Augustine found God to be.

God’s Fatherhood holds spiritual implications for the Christian. “It is a property of creatures to make one thing from another,” wrote the 14^th century friar Meister Eckhart, ”but it is a property of God to make something from nothing. And so if God is to make something of you or in you, then you must first yourself become nothingness.”

The shepherd Caedmon was no Eckhart, a man much well-lettered in ancient philosophy and Scripture. Yet it was a simple English shepherd whom the Stranger in the dream chose to make the vessel of His Voice. So Caedmon lived the rule of Eckhart six centuries before its time. For he became nothing, giving up on even what little he had, to live in the poverty of a monk, and to give his voice to Christ. He would diminish, that Christ might live within and through him.

And this is just the pattern of life that God has shown us in His Son: about whom, more next week.

This is part of a series on the Prayer Book Catechism. For previous posts, see: