From the Rector

EDITOR’S NOTE: During Fr Robert’s sabbatical, the Bell & Tower will publish a series of articles he wrote to explain the Episcopal liturgy.

This week we look at the Creed.

Before I dive into the Creed’s place in the liturgy, I encourage you to take a moment and click on this link. It is Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe Credo. It is one of many, many musical settings of the Nicene Creed. I encourage you to listen to it and imagine it as a musical companion to the Gloria we sing in the Eucharist or to any other song of praise that we sing with energy (on most Sundays).

The Nicene Creed, while without a fixed liturgical spot, has been part of the liturgy for about 1,000 years. Developed in 325 and refined through ecumenical councils, it was an attempt not only to answer any number of heresies but to articulate—to put some words to—our relationship with God upon which Christians everywhere could agree. I would offer that it is not about agreeing so much as it is aspiring to believe.

It is full of words and phrases that seem to obscure as much as they highlight—and yet they reveal much. I contend that it is best sung because it is as much a hymn as Amazing Grace or any of the other old-time favorites and yet is much, much older and reveals to us the heart of our religion.

The word religion, religio, has a few possible roots. One possibility, of which Cicero was a proponent, was that religio was based on relegere meaning to go over and over a text. Another possible root, which Lactantius promoted in the fourth century is religare which means to bind or be bound. Think of the word ligament or ligature—things that tie other things together.

The Creed is the articulation of the heart of our religion and by its careful and even joyful recitation and repetition we are bound together with one another and with God. It is a theological and historical ligament that ties even more than it binds. It is, in many ways, a love song for it is a song of creation, of protection, of guiding, of rescuing, and of being together with one another in an eternal exchange of unending self-offering.

It answered one of the most threatening early heresies: Arianism. The Arian heresy was such a threat that Saint Nicholas (yes, Santa Claus) punched the heretic bishop at the Council of Nicaea in 325 with Emperor Constantine looking on with, one imagines, some degree of exasperation. The heresy purported that Jesus was created by and subordinate to God the Father—a supposition that would have undone much of the revelation and testimony of the early Church and of Christ himself.

So we get the refutation of Arianism in the earliest lines of the Creed: “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father, through him all things were made…” The Creed was an attempt to figure out how it was that Christians could be together. What made one a Christian? It was not so much a question of belief (though it was that) but of definition. What claims do self-proclaimed Christians make?

Many think that the Creed feels like a litmus test, and it is of sorts. Though it is not so much about any individual believer’s ability to say yes or no to any and all of its claims— for any one believer to have all the necessary knowledge, faith, and revelation to affirm any and all of the Creed’s claims with utter assurance at all times and in all places would probably mark her or him as a lunatic or a charlatan. The Creed is the movement of the whole of the Holy Spirit over the whole of the Church through the whole of her history. It is our corporate aspiration and testimony.

Thanks be to God that each and every one of us need not attest to each and every comma it in. We only need have the faith and assurance that we belong to a Church—a Body of the faithful—in which the Holy Spirit has moved and in which that same Spirit has inspired to find Truth and beauty where we might find only chaos and confusion. Belief is the work not only of the individual but, and the Creed testifies to this, the community of faith lends us belief when unbelief might swallow us.

The Creed is a litmus test for whole churches, for bodies of faithful people. Are those bodies in accord and coherence with the faithful who looked upon Jesus and upon whom he smiled? Can we testify today to the same faith of the earliest generations of the Church? That is the litmus test: are we in Communion with the Body of the faithful who broke Bread in caverns and catacombs in the dimmest recesses of the Body’s memory, whose memories and testimonies live on in and through us and through the Creed?  Can we sing the hymn of love they sang with the same passion and faith?

This is what it means to be Catholic Christians. It may be helpful to dispense with a bogeyman here, the word “Catholic.” For many that seems to have connotations of a mystic cultus whose tortured root is in the dank bowels of the Romish perversion of some pure Gospel truth revealed at some point in history. Yet what would we have if not for the continuity of the Church with our earliest days? We would have no Creed, few hymns, and no Scriptures without the Catholic Church. It does us a grave disservice to decide that we are Episcopalians because we are not Catholic—or for that matter because we are not Evangelicals.

The more helpful lens may be one of continuity. We are in continuity with Rome (and the Catholic Church) and with Geneva (and the Reformers) because we have looked to the excesses of both traditions and forged a way that is not divorced from them but builds, by reason, prayer, and hope, upon the fidelity and foundations of generations past. We are bound together by their faith and their striving—this is why the ligaments of the Creed are so vital—because they allow us to stretch as reformed catholics yet remain in utter fidelity to the witness of the early Church who saw in Jesus not someone to "believe" in but someone with whom they were madly in love—and by whom they were madly loved.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert