As part of our monthly communion time, our church is beginning to learn the Apostles’ Creed. We’re using the version printed in the New City Catechism, and I’ll be teaching line by line through it. Because these teaching times are associated with our communion celebration, they will all have some tie-in to the Supper. An edited manuscript of the first of these is below.
The Apostles Creed
We believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth;
and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
We Believe
If you weren’t with us in the service last week, you may have been take off-guard by the text of the Apostles’ Creed in your bulletin, or the fact that we just recited it together.
As I mentioned last week, this is a practice which has been common among Christians for almost the entire course of church history: the formulation of written creeds and confessions concerning our faith in the Lord Jesus, and the corporate verbal confession of those creeds in public worship.
Believe
This, first of all, serves a teaching function. That we do confess - or believe - certain things about God, his work, his word, and his world means that we do not believe those things which would be contrary to our confession. Creeds, recited and taught, can help safeguard the church from heresy. They can serve to fence out false teaching.
That’s an important part of what I intend to do with these pre-communion moments in the months to come. I want to use this time before we take the supper to do intentional doctrinal instruction, using the creed as an outline. This is also why we print a weekly question and answer from the New City Catechism in your bulletin - my desire for you is to grow not only in Bible facts, but in doctrinal knowledge that helps you put those various facts together in a coherent fashion.
One frequent objection to this is that we should have “no creed but the Bible.” I would respond to that in two ways, borrowing from the work of Christian Historian Carl Trueman,
“no creed but the Bible” is itself a creed. (a very short one, but a creed)
if we believe the Bible, we must believe that the Bible means something. If this is the case, then that meaning is transferrable. It can be expressed and summarized. If we believe what the Bible teaches, we should seek to express certain central truths in summary form (the apostle Paul does this in numerous places, e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:3-5). We do this not to replace or limit the Bible, but as a practical act of submission to the Bible as the Word of God.
So, creeds teach us what we believe.
We
Who is it that believes this, though? That’s where the “we” comes into play. The second practical function of creeds is to foster and express unity within the body of Christ. We confess what we believe. Of course you must place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to receive salvation. But if the content of your faith is completely idiosyncratic to you, rather than formed by the word of God as understood by the people of God, then what you have is not saving faith in the real Christ, but a personal belief in a self-made god.
In Ephesians 4 Paul speaks of one faith, he later tells Timothy to hold fast to a pattern of sound words, and in Romans six he commends a standard of teaching. We are to be unified in the core of what we believe as Christians.
We confess this unity - unity given by the Holy Spirit, and secured by the blood of Christ - when we verbally profess the faith together. We demonstrate this unity - we act it out - when we take the bread and the cup, symbolizing the broken body and shed blood of Christ Jesus our Lord.
An excellent tool:
If you want to go deeper in your Bible study but don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars on Bible software (and lets be honest, most people shouldn’t), this is an excellent free resource: https://www.stepbible.org/