Creed

Believing together

The word comes from the Latin credo, ‘I believe’, the first word of the Western creeds. Scripture itself is full of confessions. Israel confessed, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4); the first Christians confessed that "Jesus is Lord" (1 Corinthians 12:3); and Paul introduces a summary of Christ's life with the words "By common confession, the mystery of godliness is great" (1 Timothy 3:16). He also hands on the gospel he had been given:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

A creed is this kind of speech: the faith received, passed on to the next generation. Near the end of the second century Irenaeus summed up the faith that the churches throughout the world confessed: one God the Father who made heaven and earth, his Son Christ Jesus made flesh for our salvation, and the Holy Spirit who spoke through the prophets Irenaeus, Against Heresies. In Rome those being baptized seem to have been asked in turn whether they believed in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and from those questions and answers the Apostles' Creed grew. The story that each of the twelve apostles supplied one clause is a legend; the text we use settled in the Western church by about the eighth century.

From Nicaea to today

In the fourth century creeds became boundaries against heresy. In 325 the Council of Nicaea answered Arianism with a creed confessing the Son to be of one being with the Father, and the text that came through the Council of Constantinople in 381 is the Nicene Creed we know. It is the creed most widely shared by the churches of East and West, and it begins:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

Nicene Creed

The Western church later added that the Spirit proceeds from the Father ‘and the Son’, the filioque, an addition the Orthodox churches do not accept. The Orthodox confess the Nicene Creed in their worship and do not use the Apostles' Creed, which grew up in the West.

The Reformation churches gladly kept the ancient creeds. The Lutheran Book of Concord opens with them, and the Thirty-Nine Articles say the three creeds ought to be received and believed, "for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture" Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 8. The Heidelberg Catechism asks what a Christian must believe and answers, "All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in sum" Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 22, before explaining the Apostles' Creed line by line. Many churches in Korea confess the Apostles' Creed together every Sunday.

Other Christians have preferred ‘no creed but the Bible’, a watchword of the nineteenth-century Restoration Movement and of some free churches, out of concern that human documents might take Scripture's place and divide believers. Creedal churches share the concern that nothing be put above Scripture, and call the creeds a rule that is itself measured by Scripture: we confess them not because the church decreed them but because Scripture teaches what they say. The fuller confessions of faith and the question-and-answer catechisms of the churches build on them (see The Reformed confessions).