What Do Christians Believe?

American Christian radio host Harold Camping predicted the church would be raptured on May 21, 2011 with the end to follow later that year on October 21. In case you didn’t follow the story closely, it turned out not to be true. (Shocking, I know!).

At the time, however, there was some confusion in the mainstream media about how widespread this belief was. I remember reading an article on the CBC about how Christians believe the world will end in 2011. Someone who doesn’t know what Christians generally believe confused a fringe idea with a mainstream one. They didn’t know what Christians believe.

There are lots of variations in Christian belief. There are Christians, for example, who believe we should handle venomous snakes. In the conclusion of Mark’s gospel—which is not original to the text—Jesus says believers will perform signs in his name including picking up snakes with their bare hands.  So the kids will be doing that in Children’s Church next week!

In all seriousness, though, there are a lot of different beliefs that Christians have held over the two millennia when there has been a church. What is essential to the faith and what can we agree to disagree about?

The Bible? Remember the church came into being decades before the books of the New Testament were written and centuries before they were formally recognized as Scripture. To tell good doctrine from bad doctrine, the church needed a standard by which it could judge teaching, to determine whether it was in line with the Apostles’ teaching, the earliest witnesses to Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection. So very early on, the church developed a statement of Faith called The Apostles’ Creed.

The Creed isn’t in the Bible, but it is a summary of the big story of the Bible that culminates in the resurrection of Jesus and the calling together of the church. Over the next few weeks, I want to examine it (and Bible passages that underpin it). Knowing the creed and understanding what the different sections refer to was a helpful tool for the church to interpret scripture. It still is a helpful tool for us today.

Here is the text of the Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator 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; on 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.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.

NOTE:

In case you are wondering, the word “catholic” here, with the small c, is a reference to the universal church. With a capital C it would refer to the Roman Catholic Church.

Belief

The creed begins with the words, “I believe.” We might assume that this is self-explanatory, but it’s not. The word believe means something different in our contemporary world than what it meant to the people who first formulated the creed.  To us, belief is simply an idea that we assent to. We take “I believe in God’ to mean the same thing as “I suppose that the existence of a divine being is factual.” However, The kind of belief the Apostles’ Creed refers to is much more consequential than assenting to the idea that God exists. True Belief is expressed in action. If, for example,  I say I believe generosity is important, but I never give to others when I have discretionary income, I probably don’t actually believe it.

To act as if God is the almighty father, maker of heaven and earth is to act as if all contradictory claims are not true. So when I look to other gods/entities/institutions or goods for the things I am meant to get from God—things like value, significance or protection—then I do not believe the way the creed calls me to believe. I may feel like a good monotheist because I’m not tempted to bow down to Baal or Molech, but if my self-worth is tied up in the brands I consume, if my life is directed towards the pursuit of something other than God (success, happiness, pleasure) or if I look to other things to give me a sense of security (like money) then I am an idolater. When understood from this light, I must admit I don’t believe the ideas in the Creed as I am supposed to. It’s no wonder John Calvin called the human heart an idol-making factory.

Article I: God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven & Earth

God as Creator

The first section of the creed is about the first person of the Triune God: God the Father. For modern Christians this first part of the creed seems pretty straightforward: We’re Christians, so of course we believe in God who created everything. This, of course is based on the first verse in the Bible:‌ “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). But in the context of  Ancient Israel and the early church, and in our present secular culture, this claim is controversial.

In the Ancient Near East (confusingly this is the name for ancient civilizations in the area most people commonly refer to as the Middle East) the idea that there was only one God wasn’t common. Each nation had its own god or gods. The relative power of nations was a reflection of the relative power of their deities. Even the Ancient Israelites believed in more than one God. In the early part of the Old Testament, God didn’t tell the people the other gods didn’t exist. He simply said not to worship them because he was unassailably greater than they were. This is why the first of the Ten Commandments takes the shape that it does. “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This commandment means they should worship him alone, not that they must believe in him alone. It was only as God began to reveal himself more fully that Jews became strictly monotheistic, that is believing in the existence of only one God.

In our modern world, the belief in one God who created is counter-cultural for a different reason. Many are skeptical about the idea of any gods at all. A materialist (By this I don’t mean a person who prizes material possessions too much, but rather someone who does not acknowledge the existence of any reality beyond the material reality) believes the universe exists as a consequence of random chance.

The physical laws of our universe are finely tuned to even allow the existence of matter. If the power of gravity were different, or the balance between the nuclear strong force and the weak force was different, atoms and molecules couldn’t form). So some people conclude that there must be an infinite number of universes with an infinite variation in physical properties. They believe that the complex structures of our universe are the consequence of random interactions of particles. The upshot of this, whether they acknowledge it or not, is that the existence of life is a random fluke, and is on a fundamental level, meaningless. There can be no transcendent meaning to our lives if there is no transcendent being giving them order.

For those who affirm the creed, however, our lives have a purpose that is greater than ourselves. What is that purpose? The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it succinctly:

Question: What is the chief end of man?

Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God,1  and to enjoy him forever.

To be a Christian is to hold on to hope that life has ultimate purpose.

God As Father

He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. (John 1:11-13, NIV)

The creed refers to God as the Father. Father is an ugly word these days. It reminds people about the specific failures of our earthly fathers. It reminds us of the general failure of men to live lives that blessed others. It reminds us of patriarchy and misogyny. Some people are understandably triggered by the language of God as a father.

But to judge Father God according to earthly fathers is kind of like saying you hate Italian food because you don’t enjoy Chef Boyardee. Rather than jettisoning the idea of God as Father, we need to bear in mind that all analogies break down when pushed too far. No matter how kind and loving our earthy father was, or was not, God is more so. He is the embodiment of what fathers should be, not a reflection of the sad reality that they are.

God’s fatherly nature illuminates his posture towards the cosmos he creates. We all create things. Some things we’re proud of (maybe that painting you did). Some things you wish you could forget (last night’s tuna casserole). When Nelson makes a widget in his shop, he does so because a client has need of it. But God’s creative act is an expression of the fact that he is love.

Pure love wants to love. God exists as a trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—within which perfect love exists. But just like married couples who love one another often express that love in creating more people to love, so God expresses the overflowing abundance of his love by creating a world to receive and share in his love. This is why God remains committed to the world, even when the world rebels against him. God even gives the son to allow for reconciliation: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Good parents love their children. While they may be frustrated when children make bad choices, that frustration flows from love: loving parents are grieved when their children make choices that harm them and others. So it is with God. He loves us all, but he is grieved when we live in ways that harm and dehumanize ourselves and others.

Some people pit God’s fatherly love against his holiness. This is a mistake, they are not two contradictory tendencies in God that are held in tension. Rather holiness is God’s “no” to the ways we live that damage ourselves and others whom God also loves. Because God is Father, those who believe the creed must act lovingly towards all.

‌God Almighty

The final aspect of the creed I want to look at is that it describes God as almighty. This aspect of God can make us uncomfortable. Just as some are uncomfortable with the idea that God is father because they’ve seen Fathers behave in problematic ways, so we may feel uncomfortable with the idea of God as powerful because we’ve experienced people using their power in problematic ways.

But God’s power is good news because of who he is. God is in a position to demand allegiance from all people. Ancient kings like Nebuchadnezzar (the Babylonian King who took Judah into exile) show what happens when someone cruel or capricious has power over others. When the final king of Judah, Zedekiah, tried to make a treaty with Egypt, abandoning the treaty Babylon had imposed on Judah, Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem. When Zedekiah tried to escape, Nebuchadnezzar had Zedekiah’s sons put to death in front of him, and then he put out Zedekiah’s eyes (so his sons’ death was the last thing he would ever see) before taking him off as a captive to Babylon where he lived the remainder of his days in prison.

But God doesn’t use his power like Nebuchadnezzar. God could coerce, but he chooses to woo and persuade people to accept him as their king. For God his power is expressed in self-giving love.

It’s not just that God could coerce us but doesn’t. It also means that whatever God promises us, he can deliver. When God told the Israelites not to worship the gods of the Canaanites, it was a risk for the Israelites who believed that Baal and Ashtoreth existed. Those gods might not take kindly to being ignored in their home territory, so worshiping Yahweh alone risked angering the gods. But God proved himself more powerful than all the other gods. The plagues of Egypt were calculated to systematically discredit all of Egypts gods, so the Israelites would know that God was powerful enough to protect them from the wrath of the other gods whom they might offend.

In a similar way, God asks us to trust him. His unchallengeable power is what makes that possible. We believe that we must cultivate a capacity for violence in order to keep ourselves safe. But Jesus tells us that we shouldn’t resist the evil person, but rather turn the other cheek. This seems like a recipe to get squashed. But if we believe God is a loving father and almighty, then we can trust that he will look after us, so we don’t need to find security in our strength.

Summary

To believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth means that we live as if the one who created and sustains everything loves us, is able to protect us from all things that threaten us. It is this confidence in the power and character of God that allows us to live with hope even in a broken world. And so we confess with Paul:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39, NIV)

Amen.