IB World Religions 3.4.2. Statements of Belief: the Creeds, Christ and Salvation Notes

3.4.2. Statements of Belief: The Creeds, Christ and Salvation

The two creeds

1. A creed is a short agreed statement of belief, and the word comes from the Latin credo, meaning I believe. Christians use creeds to say together what they hold.
2. The Apostles' Creed grew out of the questions put to candidates at baptism in the Western church. A medieval legend credited each clause to one of the twelve apostles, though the text reached its present form centuries later.
3. The Nicene Creed came from the councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, which is why scholars call it the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.
4. The two have different homes in worship. The Apostles' Creed belongs to baptism and daily prayer in the West, while the Nicene Creed is recited at the Eucharist by Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran congregations.
5. Both are built on the same three part frame. They confess God the Father and creator, then the Son and his life, death and rising, then the Holy Spirit, the Church, forgiveness and the life to come.
6. A third text, the Athanasian Creed, is used only in the West and only occasionally. It states the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation at much greater length and in far more technical language.

God, three and one

1. The creeds state that Christians worship one God in three persons, the Trinity, and each of the three is named in turn rather than defined in the abstract.
2. Nicaea supplied the decisive word. Against Arius, who taught that the Son was the highest of God's creatures, the council said the Son is homoousios, of one substance with the Father.
3. The creed makes the point by piling up phrases. It calls the Son God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten and not made.
4. The Incarnation is stated next in narrative form. The creed says the Son came down from heaven, was made flesh and became human, which Christians take as the claim that God has entered creation from inside it.
5. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 fixed the terms Christians still use. It confessed one person in two natures, fully divine and fully human, joined without confusion and without separation.
6. Not every group accepted these formulas. The Oriental Orthodox churches use different language about Christ's natures, and modern Unitarian churches reject the doctrine of the Trinity outright.

The Virgin Mary

1. Both creeds say that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. The claim rests on the birth narratives in Matthew 1 and Luke 1.
2. Christians who affirm the Virgin Birth read it as marking Jesus as a genuinely new beginning rather than simply the next link in a human line.
3. The Council of Ephesus in 431 confirmed the title Theotokos, God-bearer, for Mary. The decision was about Christ before it was about her, since calling her God's mother asserts that her son is God.
4. Catholic and Orthodox churches hold further beliefs about Mary. Both teach her perpetual virginity, both honour her above all saints, and both ask for her prayers.
5. The two differ where Catholic teaching has defined dogmas. The Immaculate Conception of 1854 and the Assumption of 1950 are Catholic definitions, while Orthodox Christians celebrate the Dormition without treating it as defined doctrine.
6. Protestants generally honour Mary as the mother of Jesus and a model of obedient faith while rejecting doctrines they find unsupported by Scripture, and some liberal Christians read the Virgin Birth as a theological statement rather than a biological one.

Saviour and Redeemer

1. Christians call Jesus Saviour, from the Greek soter, and the Gospel of Matthew connects the name Jesus itself with the promise that he will save his people from their sins.
2. The title Redeemer carries a different image. Redemption language comes from buying a captive out of slavery, and the New Testament describes Christ's death as the price paid.
3. The creeds state the fact without explaining the mechanism, saying only that he suffered, was crucified, died and was buried for our sake and for our salvation.
4. Christians have therefore proposed several accounts of how the cross saves. Early writers described Christ defeating death and the Devil, Anselm argued that Christ's obedience makes satisfaction for human sin, and Reformed theology developed the view that he bore the penalty in the sinner's place.
5. Abelard offered a different emphasis, that the cross moves people to love by showing God's love, and Orthodox teaching stresses Christ trampling down death so that human beings can share in the divine life.
6. Forgiveness follows from all these accounts. The Nicene Creed links it to baptism, and every tradition holds that reconciliation with God is a gift received rather than an achievement earned.

Resurrection and Ascension

1. The Resurrection is the belief that God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day, and Christians treat it as the event on which everything else rests.
2. Paul says so directly in 1 Corinthians 15, listing witnesses to the appearances and stating that if Christ has not been raised the faith is empty.
3. Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant teaching affirms a bodily Resurrection. On this reading the tomb was empty and the risen Christ was encountered as a person, not experienced as a memory.
4. Some liberal Protestant theologians read the accounts differently. Rudolf Bultmann and those who followed him held that the Resurrection is not a historical event of the ordinary kind and spoke instead of the rise of Easter faith among the disciples.
5. The Ascension, described in Acts 1 as happening forty days after Easter, closes the sequence. The creeds add that Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, an image of shared rule rather than of location.
6. Christians draw two conclusions from it. Christ's humanity is now taken into God, and his visible absence is what makes room for the Holy Spirit and for the Church's own work.

Sin, judgment and life

1. Christians define sin as rebellion against the will of God, and they treat it as a condition of human life rather than only a list of wrong acts.
2. The traditions describe its inheritance differently. Western churches follow Augustine in speaking of original sin carrying inherited guilt, while Orthodox churches speak of ancestral sin and hold that what is inherited is mortality and a bent toward sinning.
3. Beliefs about the Devil vary in the same way. Many Christians hold that Satan is a personal fallen angel, and others read the figure as a way of speaking about the reality and organized power of evil.
4. Both creeds state that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, and the Nicene Creed adds that his kingdom will have no end.
5. The creeds end by confessing forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and eternal life, so what Christians hope for is a restored bodily existence rather than the survival of a soul alone.
6. These closing lines are said aloud by the whole congregation. Reciting them together is how most Christians actually meet the doctrines, which is why the creeds function as worship before they function as theology.