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The Apostles’ Creed, like the Nicene Creed after it, is structured around God’s Triune nature:

I believe in God the Father…
I believe in Jesus Christ…
I believe in the Holy Spirit…

A reasonable question to start with would be, “Why make the distinctions?”  How important are the differences?  Why complicate things?  Wouldn’t a simple faith in Jesus be better?  And since the Trinity is a mystery no one really understands, why not just avoid it?

The first reason is simply that the Bible makes the distinctions:

• keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. – Jude 1:21
• The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. – Romans 15:33
• The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.  The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. – Romans 16:20
• The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. – 1  Corinthians 16:23
• May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all – 2 Cor 13:14

These verses and others seem to emphasize certain characteristics with the three Persons.  The Bible does not make air-tight compartments for these distinctions, and neither should we.  However, if Scripture points us to clear characteristics of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, should we not learn as much as our finite minds can understand?  If we want to get to know another person (a friend, a work colleague, a neighbor) we usually want to know more about them.  Likewise, if we want to know God as intimately as possible, we probably will want to have knowledge that is as clear and precise as we can glean from His self-revelation in the Bible.

The early Christians faced a variety of teaching about Jesus and His work and His message.  Much of that teaching was a distortion, or at least a misunderstanding of what Jesus and the Apostles taught, especially about the nature of God:

If you overemphasize God’s oneness, then you can end up saying something like the Father, Son, and Spirit are simply three costumes worn by a single divine being (i.e., the heresy called modalism). If you overemphasize God’s threeness, then you end up with three gods (i.e., the heresy of tritheism) or else a senior “God” and two lesser “gods” (i.e., the heresy called monarchianism).[1]

As the ancient church struggled to sort out the misrepresentations, the creeds took their Trinitarian forms.  First the Apostles’ Creed and later the Nicene Creed used that same basic structure to emphasize the God who had revealed Himself as three Persons:

When the Christians of the early centuries faced the task of saying who Jesus is in terms of the ‘lords many and gods many’ of the classical world, they could only do it by means of the Trinitarian’ model.[2]

That writer goes on to lament the fact that all too often we do not think in Trinitarian categories.  Our vague amalgamated idea of God can often be more “unitarian”[3] in the way any distinctions between the Persons of the Godhead are blurred and muddled together.  Muddled views of God result in muddled worship, a superficial relationship with Him, and probably confused ideas about obedience.  The clearer and more well-defined our understanding of the Triune God the better we will be able to know Him, to worship Him, to love Him, and to obey Him.

We can follow the Biblical model and the pattern of the ancient church.  In order to understand the value of the Creed, it will be helpful to begin by considering a passage that makes distinctions (if not always crystal clear) between the Father and the Son.  Our group looked at Ephesians 1:3-23.

The passage begins by naming two Members of the Trinity:  “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  After that, Paul uses pronouns almost exclusively.  In the New American Standard translation, “He,” “His,” or “Him” occur thirty-eight times.  Most of those pronouns have obvious antecedents, either the Father (“He chose us…” in v. 4a) or Jesus the Son (“…in Him” in v. 4b).  A few pronouns can be the subject of discussion (“…that we should be holy and blameless before Him” in v. 4;  Before the Father?  Before the Son?).  As one person in our group commented, they are hard to separate.  And that was a good reminder.  We are not trying to put each Person into boxes that fit our neat categories.  Rather we are trying to see what we can learn, what emphases apply to each Person.

Consider what the passage says clearly about the Father.  We made a beginning list of the affirmations about the Him:  blessed, chose, predestined, adoption, purpose, blessed (again), grace, purpose (again), plan, predestined (again), works all things, His will.  The passage goes on, but we did not.  The trend seems clear.  The Father (at least in this passage) is the Person Who originates, Who initiates, Who wills and plans.  Again, we must keep in mind that this is not to say that the Son and the Spirit are not part of the process of originating, initiating, willing and planning.  A fundamental fact about the Trinity is that the Three are One because they are perfectly relational.  All Three participate in whatever any One of Them does.  Again, the wisdom of the ancient church is helpful:

“It became indubitably clear to the Church in the fourth century that it is only when the Gospel is understood in this fully trinitarian way that we can really appreciate the New Testament teaching about Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and appreciate the essential nature of salvation, prayer and worship….The general formula which the Nicene and post-Nicene fathers employed to speak of the Triune God and his one activity was from the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, in respect of God-manward relations; and in the Spirit, through the Son and to the Father, in respect of man-Godward relations.”[4]

The Triune God has “one activity” that all three Persons fully engage in.  The prepositions “from, through and in” are helpful in trying to grasp the activity from the Triune God to humans, and “in, through, and to” encapsulate our response to the Three in One.

Often churches tend to emphasize one Person of the Trinity (or to neglect others).  Old, mainline denominations may prefer to talk about the Father.  Many evangelical groups talk mostly about Jesus.  Pentecostals concentrate attention on the Holy Spirit.  Each group may have portions of the truth of who God is.  But incomplete truth leads to distortions and even destruction of truth:

It is impossible to prefer with the Enlightenment faith in the Father-God, or with Pietism to seek to practise Christocentric theology or even a special Spirit-theology without imperilling the sure path of truth and finally losing it.[5]

C. S. Lewis recognized the tendency to exclusive emphasis on Christ: “The continual and exclusive addressing our prayers to Him surely tends to what has been called ‘Jesus-worship’? A religion which has its value; but not, in isolation, the religion Jesus taught.”[6]  Lewis’ observation is right on point.  There is an irony in trying to honor Jesus while ignoring the message He preached.  As mentioned before in these blog entries, the Gospel According to John contains over forty references when Jesus defined His mission from the Father.  Yet recently, I heard Philippians 2:10-11 quoted to exalt Jesus, “that every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”  Except that is not the end of the verse.  Paul understood the ultimate goal was “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11b).  We don’t need to emphasize Jesus less, but we need to see the bigger picture of His message, that we honor the Father through the Son by the Spirit.

Jesus’ parting words in the Gospel According to Matthew reflect His mission to His followers:  “…make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).  “The risen Jesus sends us out to continue the mission of the triune God.”[7]  The better we know that Triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, the better we will be able to carry out that mission.  May the Creed remind us and challenge us to know the Three in One ever more deeply and clearly – further up and further in.

 

[1] Michael F. Bird, What Christians Ought to Believe (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Zondervan, 2016), 62; Kindle edition location 886.

[2] J. E. Leslie Newbigin, Christian Witness in a Plural Society (London: British Council of Churches, 1977), 7.

[3] J. E. Leslie Newbigin, Christian Witness in a Plural Society (London: British Council of Churches, 1977), 7.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith:  Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (London:  T&T Clark Cornerstones, 2016), Kindle Edition, location 649 – 655, emphasis added.

[5] Karl Barth, Credo (Eugene, Oregon:  Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005), Kindle Edition Location 470.

[6] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York:  Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), 83; Kindle Edition, First Mariner Books, 2012, Location 939.

[7] Michael F. Bird, What Christians Ought to Believe (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Zondervan, 2016), 59; Kindle edition location 910.