The Cradle Of Christian Truth: The Apostles’ Creed (Part 2)—I Believe

by on February 11, 2025 | 3 Comments

As we start this series, the whole first line, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” is too much to tackle in one go. As a way of introduction to the whole idea of studying the Creed, then, this article focuses on just the phrase “I believe.” I want to think about what it means to believe the truths of the Christian faith and why the Apostles’ Creed is such a rich and needed resource to help, strengthen, increase, and express our faith.

My goal in this series is to show you that the Apostles’ Creed is about understanding the whole Bible and giving you words to express what our sacred text fundamentally teaches. This article argues that the Apostles’ Creed summarizes necessary Christian belief and helps us stand for it. More specifically, we are not yet to seeing the content of the Creed so much as seeing that having the Creed itself is biblical and good for us.

Commanded

Why should we have something like the Apostles’ Creed? Why should we have a statement of our faith that formulates for us how to express our beliefs? After all, some churches champion a mindset of “no creed but the Bible,” or “deeds not creeds.” The first thing to say is that the Latin word credo, from which we get the English word creed, just means “I believe.” The maxim, “deeds, not creeds” then means “works not beliefs,” which is either flat moralism or objection to Christianity in sum. As soon as someone asks you what the Bible teaches or how to understand a particular passage, you have moved to some sort of creed. The question then is, who came up with the creed you respond with? Is it trustworthy?

The main reason we should have creeds is because the Bible models and commands it. Scripture gives us a pattern of confessing what we believe as a way of binding ourselves to the Lord and standing together as God’s people in the faith. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses set forth the commandment from the Lord that is to be taught in the land from one generation to the next, providing a summary of religious life. Moses stated in verses 4–7:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Two things are significant for our purpose. First, verse 4 is a confession of belief. Second, verse 5 commands us to “Love the Lord your God” wholly, which is how Jesus summarizes the first four commandments, with loving your neighbor as yourself summarizing the fifth through tenth commandments. So, this passage includes a summary of belief and a summary of the Ten Commandments, two of the basics of Christian instruction.

Let us think about this confession as a biblical creed though. The statement that the Lord is one became the fundamental theological confession of Israel. This doctrine was recited in all worship services. Jesus cited it in Mark 12:29. Paul appealed to it and explained it in light of Christ in 1 Corinthians 8:4–6. The New Testament brings the same confession of the truth into the church for our use.

Paul outright said in 2 Timothy 1:13, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (emphasis added). We are meant to have a healthy formulation to state what we believe. Jude’s epistle had the initial exhortation, “Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3; emphasis added). There is an objective body of truth delivered from one generation to the next, which the church must defend. The Apostles’ Creed is our most basic summary of that faith. So, Christians are creedal because Scripture commanded it.

Cultivating

The creed and the whole disposition of being creedal is biblical, not merely as something we need to do, but also as something good for us. The creed has the powerful effect of uniting us to other believers, as we will consider in the last section. It is, however, also profoundly personal.

What is the first word in the Apostles’ Creed? I.1 This creed is about owning my beliefs. It is about stating those truths that get written on our hearts. It is about associating ourselves with the great essentials of what it means to be a Christian. I believe these truths.

We should memorize the Apostles’ Creed. Moderns are afraid of memory as if rote knowledge of something automatically means it cannot be heartfelt. But you need to remember the names of your loved ones. You need to remember their birthdates. You need to remember major events in their lives. Memory is not opposed to love. In fact, memory is a way we ingrain something upon our deepest layers. We should say the creed from the bottom of our hearts: I believe.

Belief is a powerful thing. When we announce our beliefs, we proclaim what we think is real.2 When we say the Apostles’ Creed, we are affirming our position that this summary of our faith describes reality—that it is true that God is triune, that he made the world, that Jesus Christ is the true way to salvation, and that the Holy Spirit applies salvation through the church’s means of grace.

Jesus Christ said that we should not be ashamed of him before the world. The Apostles’ Creed is one tried-and-true way we shout from the rooftops that we happily own Jesus as ours and want to be tied to him. Stating our affirmation of Christianity’s great truths makes them well up within us. It is cultivating for our faith to confess our faith.

Counter-Cultural

Being creedal is truly radical as a way to love our Christian heritage. Christians today are rightly worried about the shape of society. Unfortunately, I am not sure that we always take the right posture in response. My contention is that being creedal is truly and wildly counter-cultural in a nourishing way. How?

The culture is all about self-expression.3 Carl Trueman has identified “expressive individualism” as a key factor in the modern West’s crisis of identity politics.4 The spirit of the age is that you should be true to whatever you feel is authentic as it wells up in you. It tells you not to listen to anyone else. Anyone who contravenes your self-originating ideas and perceptions is just full of hate speech. So, our culture is one that cherishes tearing down tradition and ignoring what comes from outside us in favor of what breeds inside us.

What does Scripture say? “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received” (1 Cor 15:3). “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us” (1 John 1:3). “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Gal 1:9). “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Phil 4:9). “Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us” (2 Thess 3:6). The repeated emphasis was that Christians were meant to receive something from the apostles, which the apostles themselves had also received.

The point is clear that we are to receive what we know from outside ourselves as it is handed down to us according to our heritage as Christians. God gave us the Bible as the infallible rule of faith. The church reflected upon Scripture to summarize its most important and essential claims in the Apostles’ Creed. It is necessary to believe the Creed as this is our most basic claim as Christians to the Bible’s teaching. Lots of people pretend that they believe the Bible and pretend that they love God. If they claim something that is contrary to how Christians understand our faith, they have not comprehended the truth and do not know the true God.

It is counter-cultural to stand with the Creed as a testimony to be received from outside ourselves. It is better to be taught than to presume to know. Our culture hates that idea. Let us as Christians then be eager to receive truth rather than to invent it.

That posture corresponds with the gospel. Faith looks outside ourselves for salvation. So too, faith should look outside itself for the message of salvation.5 Faith looks to Jesus for his work on our behalf to make us right with God. So too, we ought to receive what he has said to know what is true.

We speak weekly of Christ’s work for us as priest—his life, death, and resurrection to reconcile us with God and grant us everlasting life. We should also remember Christ’s kingship, that he rules his people for our good. He promised to advance his church, that hell’s gates would never prevail against us.

Christians have been citing the Apostles’ Creed for at least 1800 years. We get to say the same exact words as believers of millennia past. We get to celebrate Christ for the same truths that have been handed down since the church’s cradle. Jesus has preserved his church. He has upheld us in seeing and loving these fundamental truths in the Bible. Jesus reigns. We get to celebrate his grace and faithfulness to us every time we declare “I believe . . .”

Notes

  1. J. I. Packer, Affirming the Apostles’ Creed (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 29.
  2. Packer, Affirming the Apostles’ Creed, 25–26.
  3. Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, Christian Essentials (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 10-11.
  4. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).
  5. Casper Olevianus, An Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, trans. Lyle D. Bierma, Classic Reformed Theology )Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), 16–17.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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3 comments

  1. Seems to me if one is going to forgo creeds because they are man-made, then one also needs to forgo preaching as well and why stop there? Why not just go around reciting scripture to others instead of actually doing what scripture tells us to do, such as ” Let your speech always be gracious….” or “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect…”

    Reply ↓

  2. Dr. Perkins – thank you for your contribution and continuation of this series. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the content and the expounding of the Apostles Creed (AC) in such a simple style.

    One series of questions I have: most modern evangelicals (perhaps Christians at large as well) seem to be hesitant to memorize the AC. I suggested it to a group of friends within the past year. One friend questioned the orthodoxy of the AC, another opted simply to “memorize scripture instead.”

    Where does this sense of hesitation (and potential ignorance) come from? It seems as though some of it could correlate with your reference to Dr. Trueman’s notion of radicalized individualism; but in general, why the hesitation? Do you think there’s a (gnostic) tendency to treat scripture as “pure” and everything else “corrupted”?

    Curious where you see some of the hesitation. Apologies if I missed it in the article.

    Reply ↓

    • In some ways, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to diagnose this hesitation. I’ve heard several different reasons over the years. My suspicion is that something similar undergirds them all, but I have not quite put my finger on it.

      Some say “the Creed is manmade, so we shouldn’t use it in church.” Well, yes, but those very same people love singing manmade hymns. Although the Creed is manmade, it is still the longest standing summary of Christian truth we have.

      Some say, “Isn’t that Roman Catholic?” No, it’s basic Christian. But sometimes we do need to do work to help people see why we value the creeds.

      My sense is often that the creeds are just unfamiliar to people, and we often have a knee jerk reaction against the unfamiliar. Those who are new to church at all have never brought concerns about the creeds to me. It is those who have church experience, but have not used the creeds, who have hesitation. We often like church to be comfortable on our own terms. While I hope church is comforting in a certain sense, we need to have that built around what God has told us in his Word.

      Americans do like to feel innovative. The creeds push against that, rightly so concerning theology. This might also be a factor.

      You can probably tell that I’m trying to verbalize as I mull on it. I hope these ramblings are still helpful somehow.

      Reply ↓

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