The Apostles' creed in modern worship

Front matter

THE APOSTLES’ CREED IN MODERN WORSHIP

IN

| KHlodern Worshtp

Contents

ETERNAL LIFE .

PAGE

. 105

CHAPTER I “oF believe ’’

Tue Christian religion founded itself on faith. In the days of the apostles if some anxious inquirer asked what he must do to be saved, the answer was, “ Believe.” + In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read a long list of those who, having accomplished great things, are accounted worthiest of commemoration by God’s people, and the writer’s statement of the ease is that “these all obtained a good report through faith.”? Still another apostle assures us that “ this is the victory which is overcoming the world, even our faith.’3 While it is the Master Himself who says that one who had faith and doubted not could say to this mountain, © “ Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea,” and it should be done; and that “all things are possible to him that believeth.” 4

In other words, a man who can believe can do anything, for he has already done the hardest thing. Faith itself, this transcending of sense, this assurance of the unseen, this access to the infinite, this ability to endure as seeing the invisible—faith is the highest achievement of humanity. All other things must seem easy by comparison to the man who has / really succeeded in this; “all things are ¥ possible to him that believeth.” Always it is by some sort of faith, more or less articulate, that men have subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained , promises, and done and borne other things worthy to be remembered on the earth.

But as our religion thus greatly magnifies faith, so it also enforces the value of a confession of the faith. ‘ Believing we therefore speak,” ® says the apostle, quoting from one of the ancient psalmists. Another psalmist at a time of spiritual depression had kept his doubts to himself, because, “If I say I will speak thus, I should offend against the generation of thy children.” ® The good man was unwilling to speak out thoughts which could only drive his neighbors toward cowardice and despair ; a resolute reticence which has much of the heroic in it. But when a man had in his heart anything that made for hope and courage, he must by all means speak it out and give his neighbors the benefit of it. “We cannot but speak the things that we have seen and heard,’* cry the brave apostolic witnesses. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness,’ says Paul, “and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” ® And the Master Himself insists with much urgency that the disciple whom He will honor shall be the disciple who confesses Him.

The public worship of the church has always included a large element of testimony, or witness-bearing, or confession of faith. At first it was necessarily spontaneous and individual; as when the women running quickly from the sepulchre brought word to the disciples that the Lord was risen;1° or when the two returning from Emmaus related how “ He was known to them in the breaking of bread”; *! or when years afterward Saul of Tarsus testified how the Lord had appeared to him also as he journeyed toward Damascus./2 Testimonies as personal as

those of a modern revival meeting, except that they were to objective fact rather than subjective experience. In a little while, however, the members of the churches would crave more general forms of confession in which the voices of many could join for their mutual encourage- | ment. Even in the earliest days of persecution in Jerusalem, the fourth chapter . of the Acts relates how, when the threatened apostles returned to their fellows, they all lifted up their voices with one accord, repeating the glorious sentences of the second Psalm—“ Why did the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things? ”—and then continuing: “ For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done,’ %* 13 Acts 4:24-80. 5 words in which you cannot fail to hear the beginning of a formal confession of faith by the united voices of a congregation as part of their Christian worship.

So there had come into existence very early those “ hymns and spiritual songs ” by the singing of which the apostle charged the faithful “to teach and admonish one another,” 14 which very thing we are still forward to do.

But the hymns that we sing serve other purposes besides the direct confessing of faith. They are quite as apt to be a confession of sin; or sometimes they will be an entreaty for God’s favor; furthermore, even in a Christian congregation, not all the people know how to sing. If, as a congregation, we have some common faith, we crave some common form of words by which we may show it in our public worship of God. If only there . might be some great hymn of the Church, to be said, not sung—a hymn hallowed by age but still the vehicle of present and living conviction, through which we all, adding our voices to the countless hosts of those who have gone before, might speak forth our grateful confessions to the world.

But here we are confronted by the difficulty that with the passing of time many of the thoughts of men have so completely changed as to make any common expression seem impossible. Go back even four hundred years—not to speak of nineteen hundred—and you will find men living in a world of ideas so radically different from our own that we seem to have no point of intellectual contact with them.

There is a famous passage in the first chapter of Froude’s “ History of England ” in which that great historian sets forth the revolutionary changes of the period which he was undertaking to describe. ‘ Chivalry was dying,” he says.

“The abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruin; and all the. forms, desires, beliefs, and convictions of the Old World were passing away never to return. A. new continent had risen up beyond the Western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space. . . . Between us and the old English themselves is a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination cannot fully penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells .. . which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.” 15

Yes, a vanished world; and the ques-

15 Froude’s “‘ History of England,” I, p. 65. 8 tion which has started up to perplex us is this: How could any form of words which had truly expressed the faith of those far-away believers in that vanished world serve also as a truthful confession of our faith to-day?

Our first impulse would be to declare the thing impossible; but before we settle upon that answer we must reckon with another phenomenon, namely, that just/at ne, this time many branches of the Church are | giving larger place than they had given before to the recitation of a very ancient Creed, namely, that which commonly goes | by the name of the Apostles.

Of the various Protestant communions, the Lutheran in all its branches has always used this Creed in the regular service of the Lord’s day. The Church of England has so used it, and also at the administration of baptism. The Liturgy of the Reformed Church in America, commonly called the Dutch Reformed

Church, appoints that this Creed be recited at evening service and at the Communion. The Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church provides a place for it in the order of public worship for the Lord’s day. The Liturgy of the French Protestant Church prescribes it at the evening service. The Order of Worship for the Reformed Church in the United States, commonly called the German Reformed Church, appoints that it be recited at the morning and evening service. The Euchologion, or Book of Common Order, prepared by the Church Service Society of Scotland, also provides that it be recited Sunday morning and evening. With a view to the preparation of a book of forms of worship for the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, a series of questions was sent out a few years ago, the answers to which disclosed the fact that a very large number of churches of that communion had 10 adopted the custom of repeating this Creed as a regular part of public worship. The book which has now been issued inserts the Creed in the order for morning service. It had always been printed with the standards of that church.

It appears then that this ancient confession meets a present hunger in the hearts of God’s people. Just because of the intellectual ferment of the time, perhaps, when “change and decay in all around we see,” we long the more for something that changeth not, some form of words hallowed by immemorial antiquity, in which we might all heartily and confidently unite.

This desire appears, too, at the very time when the more modern confessions are losing their hold on the regard of Christian people. Being the property of some limited section of the Church, these have stood for sectarian division rather than union, and we now grow weary of

ae them. What we hunger for is some more universal hymn of faith which the whole Church of Christ from the beginning might repeat together. One of our most honored leaders has lately affirmed that “the deepest spiritual life of to-day retains the Catholic creeds,” that is, those of the ancient Church, “ with joy as expressions of devotion and as holy inheritances.” 16

That may be true of all the older creeds, but more emphatically is it true of the one which, for most of its articles, is the oldest of them all, going back as it does almost to the time of those who heard the voice of Jesus Christ. I propose in the following chapters to study this most venerable of all the Christian symbols.

The name by which the whole world now knows the symbol is “ The Apostles’ Creed.” Just how that name originated

16 “The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion,” by Charles Cuthbert Hall, p. 125. Dr. Hall adds that they are not retained ‘‘as tests of belief.”’

it may not be possible to say. An old tradition which can be traced back to the fourth or fifth century of our era has it that the apostles themselves actually came together and composed this creed, each furnishing one sentence. An anonymous writer of a somewhat later date even undertook to specify just which sentence came from each apostle, as that Peter said, “‘ I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth”; Andrew adding, “ And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord ”’; and then James his sentence, and so on through the list.17 An idle fancy, of course, for we know that some of these sentences were not included in the Creed till a good while after the death of the apostles; yet it seems hardly a misnomer to name it from them, for almost every phrase is directly scriptural, and the Creed itself, as a creed, grew from beginnings that were almost or quite as

17 “The Apostles’ Creed,”’ by Arthur C. McGiffert, p. 29. 13 early as the days of the apostles themselves.

It may be well first to indicate briefly what can be known concerning the origin of this great confession of faith. Within the last generation much new light has been thrown on the subject by the labors of the late Professor Caspari, of Norway, Professor Kattenbusch, of Tibingen,'® and Professor McGiffert, of New York City. Its present form can be traced back to a time five or six hundred years after Christ. The larger part of it, however, is known to be very much older than that, for we can trace most of the phrases through various earlier writers; for instance, through a Latin writer named Rufinus, of about the year 400 a.p., who lived in Aquileia and wrote a treatise on the form of the Creed in use in that place; and a Greek writer named Marcellus of Ancyra, of about 337; and so back to

Tertullian, the famous Church father who began to write before the close of the second century in North Africa, and Irenus, his contemporary in Southern Gaul. Tertullian, in particular, writes in a way which leaves no doubt, not only that he was familiar with this “rule of faith,” as he calls it, but also that he himself acknowledged its authority; which renders it reasonably certain that the substance of our Creed was in regular use throughout the churches as early as the year 175. In this simpler form it is commonly known as the Old Roman Symbol. From various passages in Tertullian and Ireneus, compared with these later writers, we learn that it read about as follows:

“‘T believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus His Son, who was born of Mary the Virgin, who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried, the third day rose from the dead, ascended into the heavens, sitteth on the right hand of the Father, whence He cometh to judge the living and the dead: and in the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the flesh.” 1° It

19 McGiffert, p. 7, cf. p. 42. It may be interesting to give one or two of Tertullian’s references to this Creed as accepted in his time. ‘‘ On the Veiling of Virgins,” Chapter I. ‘The rule of faith, indeed [regula quidem fideil], is altogether one, alone, immovable and irreformable; the rule, to wit, of believing in one only God omnipotent, the Creator of the universe, and His Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised again the third day from the dead, received in the heavens, sitting now at the right hand of the Father, destined to come to judge quick and dead through the resurrection also of the flesh.”

‘“‘ On Prescription against Heretics,’’ Chapter XIII. ‘‘Now with regard to this rule of faith—that we may from this point acknowledge what it is that we defend—it is, you must know, that which prescribes the belief that there is one only God, etc.” So he continues, giving a somewhat fuller statement of belief than that quoted above.

It should be noted that Tertullian wrote in Latin, while there is sufficient evidence that the original, and therefore older, form of the Old Roman Symbol was inGreek. “For fully two centuries and a half Greek was the predominant language, if not of the city of Rome as a whole, yet of large sections of its inhabitants.” Sanday, ‘Commentary on Romans,” p. lii. Sanday goes on to say that “it is generally agreed that the Creed was in use at Rome by the middle of the second century. The main question at the present moment is whether it was also composed there, and if not, whence it came. Caspari would derive it from Asia Minor and the circle of St. John.”

Kattenbusch and McGiffert, however, think that it originated in Rome.

is a little shorter than the Creed as we know it, but otherwise they are almost identical.

A few obscure references have been found in still earlier writers, both of the West and of the East, which some scholars think imply their familiarity with this same symbol. But omitting these from our survey, we have traced the substance of the Creed which many of us love to repeat back to the time of men who knew the men who had known our Lord’s apostles. For this Irenzeus was a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna, who in his turn was a disciple of the Apostle John.

This Creed then in its older and simpler form, this Old Roman Symbol, antedates the Nicene, the next oldest of our great Christian symbols, by not less than a century and a half; and comes so nearly into contact with apostolic teaching as to give it some title to the apostolic name. Ina deed, its true and original starting-point seems to be nothing else than the baptismal commission recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: “ Baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” 2° It appears that what we call the Apostles’ Creed is a gradual amplification of that original declaration of the faith of a Christian.

It appears also that this process of amplification was going on in all parts of the Church, East and West; following everywhere the same general lines but with slight local differences in phraseol-

20 Matt. 28:19. Tertullian writes [Adv. Prax. 2]: ‘‘We believe this (Son of God) to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and born of her, Man and God, Son of Man and Son of God, and named Jesus Christ; this one to have suffered, died, been buried according to the Scriptures, and raised by the Father, and taken up into heaven, that He sits at the right hand of the Father, and that He shall come to judge the living and the dead; Who thence sent, according to His promise, from the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, Sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The closing paragraph seems to imply that the entire Creed, as here rehearsed, was recognized as only a fuller development of Matthew’s formula.

ogy. Rufinus, for instance, points out one particular in which the Creed as recited in his own church at Aquileia differed from that used at Rome, and also from those used in the Hast; 7! yet all these various - forms were so much alike that from places so far apart as North Africa, Southern France, Aquileia, near modern Venice, and Ancyra, two hundred miles east of Constantinople, come reports of a Creed hardly to be distinguished, except in brevity, from the one we still repeat. The precise form that was finally selected for perpetuation among the Western churches was probably that which approved itself to Christian sentiment as best of all these variations.

In the Kast the Nicene Creed, after its completion in the year 381, very soon supplanted all others, but it takes little study of that great confession to show that it also was only a more metaphysical devel-

21 McGiffert, p. 191. ‘‘ Pearson on the Creed,” p. 346.

opment of some form of the same original rule of faith.

It should be remembered that this Apostles’ Creed was devised as a baptismal confession, which still continues to be its most important use in the ancient Church of Rome. The new convert, presenting himself for initiation, though he knew that in going forward he faced the possibilities of literal martyrdom, even with that dread prospect before him would lift up his face toward heaven and solemnly proclaim, “I believe in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His Son.”

Ah! if our great English historian heard in the sound of a church bell “ the echo of a vanished world,” what shall we say of the stately music of these sentences coming down from a far more distant past, in which those early confessors long ago breathed out their faith before they went to the lions, or to the fire, or to the cross, but which ten thousand lips are still repeating round the world every Lord’s day? Here is the echo of a vanished world which at the same time sounds forth the living and loving convic- | tion of a present world. We claim a place in a very goodly company when we open our lips to say “ I believe.”

We are now to study this ancient confession, sentence by sentence, to see whether we can understand why its ancient phrases should prove so grateful to modern lips.

Chapter II

“ef believe in God the Father Almightp, Maker of heaven and earth ; and in Jesus Christ bis onlp Son our Hord.’’

So begins this declaration of faith for which, in the old days when Rome was still a heathen empire, brave men and women were willing to die. The question which is to face us in our study is whether this, or any form of words inherited from so distant a past, could serve as a vehicle for men’s convictions in this living present. It has seemed unlikely; yet we may answer “ Yes” unhesitatingly and without need of argument, since the facts so evidently prove the truth of the assertion.

The fact is, as stated in the last chapter, that, with singular unanimity, in many parts of the earth and many branches of the Church, Christian people are now raising their voices in the language of this oldest of all the creeds. No need of arguing that they ought to like it, when they so evidently do. My task is simply to account for this liking if I can.

“T believe.” Certainly the old creed begins well. No wonder the people like its opening phrase. What we were looking for was a declaration of faith; so that if a man had any faith at all—even a very little, like a grain of mustard-seed—he might speak it forth. Here then is the very form of words to suit him, “I believe.”

There have been creeds, or confessions of faith, so-called, which open very differently ; perhaps with some abstract impersonal philosophic definition; or even with a damnatory clause, as in the Athanasian Creed, aimed at those who should refuse to recite. Whatever other purposes such documents might serve, this is evidently a far better beginning for purposes of worship, “I believe.”

This is what every worshipper must wish to say if he can. For any man’s faith, if he has one, is so incalculably precious. Even if he trembles in the telling of it, and though his temper is so nearly allied to doubt that he must ery with the poor father in the Gospel, “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelef ” 1—even so let him do his best to range himself frankly with the believers rather than the doubters or deniers— ““T believe.”

But what do I believe? This creed does not offer me a “ what,” but rather a “whom.” “T believe in God,” it says.

But it is hardly worth while to try to explain that first article taken alone by : 1 Mark 9; 24.

itself ; for this Creed proposes to be Christian, setting forth the faith which one could not profess except as a Christian; but there had been men of all varieties of religious connection who might have declared a faith in God. There is nothing distinctly Christian in such an article; nor even if it should name him “ Maker of heaven and earth,’ and in some sense “Father ” to all that He has made.

‘* Father of all! in every age In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord ;—”

every one knows the musical but rather colorless sentences of Pope’s “ Universal Prayer.” But the worn-out confessions of those ancient savages and sages would not serve for the belief that demands utterance from our lips to-day.

No; for our present faith in God—if we have any—springs from quite another source, and one which is not indicated in | that opening article taken by itself; so we must not delay to add the second.

“T believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.” There at last you have a Christian creed; and though it comes from the first or second century, it gives a wonderfully correct expression to the Christian faith of the twentieth century.

For what is our present Christian faith? Assuming that we have some sort of inclination to call ourselves Christians, what is 1t that we believe? Leave one side, if you please, all outgrown theory and speculation ; insist upon the most accurate and most modern statement for the religious belief that is in you to-day—what is it and whence comes it? You, a man living and working in this modern world, in this particular year and day, what point of contact have you found between yourself and the world of the unseen and the eternal? Surely, if you like to call yourself in any sense a Christian, you will answer that the point of contact is nothing else than Christ Himself, that strange being who appeared on earth nineteen hundred years ago, and who still speaks to us from the pages of this Book—Jesus Christ. For the reason why our modern world has been able to retain some degree of faith in God the Father, is because it cannot help believing in Jesus Christ His Son.?

Here let me call attention to two peculiarities of the religious situation of our day; first, the increasing difficulty of believing in God’s Fatherhood; and second, | that it has become inevitable for us to. believe in God’s Fatherhood if we are to believe in God at all.

‘The increasing difficulty of believing in’ God’s Fatherhood comes from the tenden- |

2This statement will receive further consideration and confirmation in the concluding chapter.

cies of modern scientific thought. Men were never so oppressed before as they are to-day by the apparent heartlessness of the universe. Darwin and his associates have given a new color to all our thinking. Even though we may not call ourselves Darwinians, the very phrases they have taught us, “ natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,” “the survival of the fittest,” have a hopeless, godless sound. Indeed, even before the scientists had formulated their theories, or invented their phrases, these apprehensions were already in the air. Two generations of readers now have been confessing with the poet Tennyson that ‘Nature, careful of the type, seems careless of the single life’; and that ‘red in tooth and claw with ravine, she shrieks against the creed’ that the God who made such a world can pity or love A

3 The “Tn Memoriam ”’ was published in 1850, the “ Origin of Species”’ not till 1859.

thoughtful writer of our time has entitled his book, ‘‘ Can I Believe in God the Father?” + And it never seemed quite so hard as it seems to-day to answer, “ Yes.”

That, then, is one peculiarity of the present religious situation, the increasing difficulty of believing in God’s Fatherhood. But the other peculiarity is that if we are to go on believing in God at all, it has become necessary to believe in His Fatherhood. For a being of infinite power merely, or of infinite wisdom, who lacked the moral qualities that would enable us to trust him as a father, would not seem to us now a God at all. It might do in other ages for men to believe in their Moloch or their Mars or their Thor; now he must be a father, else we will not own him God. So just at the time when it has grown most difficult, it has also grown inevitable that we should believe in a divine

4“‘Can I Believe in God the Father?” by William Newton Clarke.

Fatherhood, or else give up believing in God.

We have not given up believing. In spite of the difficulty, we do believe in the Fatherhood. But why? How can you explain so strange a phenomenon? I will tell you why. The explanation is historical. A great while ago a Child was born into this world the deepest and surest element of whose personal consciousness was that God was His Father. That is the explanation; that is why, against whatever difficulties, we still believe in our Father God. The whole world has read the story of that strange Child. We have heard those first recorded words from Him when he was twelve years old, “ Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? ” © . We have seen Him afterward at the Jordan, grown to manhood, baptized to His public mission, and a voice from above saying, “ This is my beloved Son.”*® We have followed Him straightway into the wilderness, and there have found Him resisting a very different voice from below, which said, sneeringly, “If thou be the Son of God.”* We have heard Him teaching His disciples to pray “ Our Father ;” § teaching them to trust, since “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of;’’ ® teaching them to aspire, “ that ye may be the children of your Father ;’ ?° teaching them to forgive, “ else my Father will not forgive you.” 1! We have followed Him into the deep shadow of the garden and heard Him in His agony erying, “ O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”1!2. And when the cup was forced to His lips, and His lifelong trust had seemed to be set at naught, and His enemies had worked their cruel will upon

Him, with no hindrance from heaven, there, hanging on the cross, we have heard Him say: “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;’ }3 “ Hather, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”?4 Always, Father, Father, Father.?®