Classroom, Communion and Creed: A Homily on the Place of the Creeds in the Church Today

 

Classroom, Communion and Creed:   A Homily for the Signs of Our Common Faith Lenten series at Trinity Church, Barrie, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, March 15^th, 2024.  There is a video recording of this service and homily here.

It would have been about this time of year, 1700 years ago, in the later weeks of Lent, that those seeking to become Christians, called catechumens, would have been preparing for baptism.   As part of this preparation, they would have been expected to learn the statement of our faith that today call the Apostles’ Creed (the Nicene Creed was first written in 325 but did not come into wide use until a few centuries later).  Then, just before Holy Week, the catechumens would come before their bishop and, one by one, be expected to recite the Apostles’ Creed as well as the prayer we call the Our Father, and to answer questions put to them.

St Augustine, a learned and socially prominent figure, would have had to submit himself to this process of instruction and preparation before he was baptised by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387.   By that time, the persecutions had ended and Christianity was now the official religion of the Roman Empire, but the church still regarded the ability to say and understand the Creed as a necessary qualification for baptism, and only then could the new Christian participate in the Mass and receive the sacrament.

So the Creed functioned then as it does now, as a sign of Christian identity.  However, the place of the creeds in the life of the church has changed considerably.   For the early church, the Creed (specifically the Apostles’ Creed) was used as a core curriculum, so that the novice Christian could understand the identity and the saving actions of the three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Creed in the early church was for the classroom, not for communion.   It did not have a place in the liturgy of the church.

Where the creeds came from is a long story that can only get a brief answer in a short homily. The Apostle’s Creed was not, as was charmingly claimed, written by the original apostles.   However,  we know from scripture that the earliest Jesus followers had statements of core belief that proclaimed Jesus as Lord (Christus kyrios) and which contain the building blocks of Christian belief.   

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel.  (2 Tim 2,8)

The Apostle’s Creed probably came together over time as a synthesis of these scriptures and teachings around them.   

By the fourth century the Apostles’ Creed had become a way to instruct new Christians and to distinguish them from pagans.    The Nicene Creed, as Gregory Dix noted, was written to answer theological debates among Christians – was Jesus human or divine (answer, both)?  Thus the Nicene Creed, with its more robust Christology, works well in the Eucharist, whereas the Apostle’s Creed is sufficient for services of the word and for the daily offices.  By the sixth century the Nicene Creed had found its place in the mass following the gospel, where it still lives today, though before the Reformation it seems that the people recited the Apostle’s Creed while the priests said the Nicene Creed.

Today, I think it’s fair to say that we know and say the Creeds (Apostles and Nicene) almost exclusively in liturgy.   They don’t really have a secure home elsewhere in the life of our church.  We have communion, but we don’t really have classroom.   Why did this happen?  The practice of infant baptism meant that instruction was shifted to the process of confirmation, which was once a precondition for first communion.  Confirmation in turn lost much of its importance as the Anglican church gradually adopted the practice of the open table, so that we do not ask people to believe before they receive.  One could argue that it’s more grace filled to invite seekers to first encounter Christ in bread and wine and then seek instruction in the faith, but this puts the onus on the church to explain our faith after the fact, rather like giving someone driving lessons after they’ve been on the road.  And, since we see fewer and fewer new believers these days, we have largely lost the skills of catechesis, the instruction of new Christians.

Even so, in liturgy the creeds still function as a sign of belief and of Christian identity.   We say them together, and while the rubrics don’t tell us to, we stand by custom, paying the creeds the same honour that we pay to the gospel and to the processional cross.   By tradition we turn and face the altar, eastward in most churches, east being the direction of sunrise and the direction from which Christ is expected to return.  Some of us make the sign of the cross as we confess our belief in the resurrection.    So the act of participating in, even performing, the creeds is collective, so still a sign of our identity, though perhaps not of unity.   Not all of us, myself included, could recite either creed perfectly, nor could many of us explain the articles of the creeds, even following the old catechism printed in the Book of Common Prayer.

Barbara Brown Taylor once said that we say the creeds together because there are days when we might not believe all we say, and so rely on others to believe for us, and vice versa.    While this statement would likely startle early Christians like Augustine and Ambrose, it does at least have the merit of being honest.   Western Anglicans are, after all, a 21^st century church which sometimes seems more comfortable living the questions than it does having all the answers.   Believing and reciting ancient creeds can seem charmingly archaic in our postmodern age.  

However, our task is not to be relevant but to be faithful.   The creeds tell us that a good and gracious God created all things.   The creeds tell us that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, that he has conquered sin and death, and that he gives us the hope of the resurrection.  The creeds assure us that the Holy Spirit is amongst us.  The creeds unite us with those who have believed and proclaimed the gospel over the long centuries.   These are the beliefs that I would offer to someone seeking to learn our faith.  

Let me finish with a final thought as to what the creeds are not.   Some churches and Christians call themselves creedal in a way that suggests that others are not true, faithful Christians. I dislike this use of creedal.  And in that spirit, let’s notice some of the things that the creeds do not say.  The creeds say nothing about how to do liturgy, they are silent as to the number and nature of the sacraments, and the creeds do not tell us how to govern or structure our churches.  The creeds tell us that the world was created but not how or when;  they allow us to believe in dinosaurs.  The creeds say nothing about gender, about marriage, or about preference.  And the creeds do not tell us that Christians should rule society.   

So the creeds are not weapons to be used in church culture wars. The creeds simply tell us that Jesus Christ is Lord.   And for us, at this time, as it was for Augustine and Ambrose and all those before them, that is surely all we need,