CREEDS. From the times of the early Church till the present day definitely formulated confessions of faith have played a large part both in the liturgy and in the theology of all Christian de nominations. We find them in the early Church predominantly as baptismal confessions, i.e., as formulae which are spoken by the candidate at the sacrament of baptism or confirmed by him in response to a question put by the person baptising him (see BAP TISM). Since the Council of Nicaea (325), however, they have served concurrently as formulae for dogmatic decisions of ecclesi astical councils; and in the early middle ages they also began in Spain and Gaul to be recited ceremonially in the Sunday worship, a custom introduced also into the Roman mass by Pope Benedict VIII. in about the year 1020 at the wish of the Emperor Henry II. Since that time the Creed has been an established part of the Roman liturgy and has passed thence into the new-formed liturgies of the churches of the Reformation.
The oldest creed of the kind is the confession of the Roman Church which we have in its Greek form in a letter of Bishop Marcellus of Ancyra written in 34o and in Latin in several manuscripts.
It runs: I believe in God, the Father, the AImighty.
And in Christ Jesus, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, on the third day rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, whence he will come to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Ghost, the holy Church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh.
A careful examination of the text, yields the result that the Greek form is the original, the Latin the translation : and as Greek was the official ecclesiastical language in the Roman corn munity only till the middle of the third century, we can draw the conclusion that the formulation of this creed must have taken place before 25o. The Latin translation, however, will already have been made at a very early date and it spread from Rome throughout the West. All Latin creeds of the West, from Africa, Spain,"Gaul, Britain, Germany, are derived from the Latin form of the Roman creed, which they took over as a whole and de veloped further in its details by minor alterations or additions. For the middle ages and the modern age the so-called Apostolicum (or "Apostle's Creed") has attained the greatest importance among these descendants of the old Roman creed. We find it al ready in the seventh century in Gaul, whence it spread both to Ireland and to Spain and Germany. It is connected in origin with a form of the creed which we find associated with Bishop Niceta of Remesiana (to-day Bela Palanka on the Serbian-Bulgarian frontier). about 400. The official text of the Apostolicum runs: I believe in God the Father, the Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead and buried, descended to hell, the third day rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence he will come, to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost, a holy catholic Christian Church, com munion of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the flesh, and an everlasting life. Amen.
Whilst, therefore, we can prove the existence in the West since the 4th century of a single form of the creed preserved, although with numerous variations, through the centuries without a break till the present day, for the East a wealth of creed forms is characteristic, differing widely from one another. Of special im portance is the creed of the first ecumenical synod of Nicaea (325), which was formulated in defence against Arianism. It runs: We believe in one God, the Almighty Father, creator of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, who alone was begot ten of the Father [that is of the substance of the Father] God of God, Light of Light [very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father], through whom all was made that is in heaven and on earth, who for us men and for our salvation came down and became flesh, became man, suffered and rose on the third day, is ascended to heaven and will come to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Spirit.
In this formula of the synod we have an ancient eastern bap tismal confession into which the clauses marked [ . . . ] have been inserted as dogmatic formulas in defence against Arius. Similar confessions are preserved to us in ever changing forms, from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. With the forms beloved in the Jerusalem district is closely related the creed which in its Latin form is customary in the western liturgy and is used to the present day in the liturgy of the mass. It also is commonly called the Nicene, although it arose later and is officially attributed by the Byzantine Church to the second ecumenical synod of Constanti nople (381). Its wording is : We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begot ten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made: who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again to judge both the living and the dead: whose kingdom shall have no end.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, and with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets. And we believe one catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowl edge one baptism for the remission of sins. And we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
In these two examples already can be seen the variety of the oriental creeds and their freedom in large and small alterations of the text. We add to them an Egyptian confession, which is attributed to Macarius (about 3 70) : I believe in one God the Almighty Father.
And in the Logos of one substance with him, through whom he made the world, who at the end of the times took his dwelling in flesh for the destruction of sin, which he prepared for himself out of the Holy Virgin Mary, crucified and dead and buried and risen the third day and seated at the right hand of the Father, and who comes again in the world to come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost, who is of one substance with the Father and his Logos. We believe also in the resurrection of the soul and of the body, as the apostle says: `It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.' In spite of all this variability of the creed, due to the liturgical freedom of the East, the attempt can be made to construct a common archetype out of which the eastern confessions grew. It may perhaps have run : I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the creator of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who was born of the Father before all aeons, through whom all came into being, who (for our salvation) became man, suffered and rose the third day and is ascended into the heavens and will come again (in glory), to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Ghost.
From this arises the problem concerning the origin of the creed. Have Rome and the East a common root, or is one of the great centres of Christendom the original home of the creed, and have the others borrowed it from these? And at what time may the oldest formulated creed have arisen? This problem has been discussed with special eagerness in Norway by C. P. Caspari, in Germany by A. v. Harnack and F. Kattenbusch, in England by A. E. Burn; in particular the fundamental work of Kattenbusch has become of determining influence in the method of the enquiry. In numerous ecclesiastical writers of the first centuries occur single clauses or longer discussions which show relationship, both in form and in content, with the clauses of the creed. All these pas sages have been regarded as allusions to the confession of faith, and the attempt has been made to reconstruct out of them the creed familiar to the writer in question. In this attempt the presuppo sition is always that the type which finds expression in the Roman and eastern creeds must lie at the basis also of all earlier con fessions of faith, and that it is therefore only necessary to piece together according to the known scheme the scattered allusions of the writer examined in order more or less to recover his creed. In this way for instance a creed of Justin Martyr's, who worked in Rome about I50, can be restored : I believe in the Father of all things and the Lord God.
And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the first-born Son of God, according to the Father's will born through a virgin and become passible man and crucified under Pontius Pilate and dead and risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, and will come again in the glory as judge of all men.
And in the Holy Spirit of prophecy.
We should have here a primitive form of the Roman creed discussed above and should thus be in a position to trace back the history of its origin to the year i 5o and establish as highly probable that the very first formulation of the creed is due to Rome, and that from thence it entered upon its victorious progress through the whole of Christendom. Other scholars, above all A. Seeberg and later P. Feine, have even thought it possible by help of the allusions to work back to the New Testament period and to put the date of the origin of the creed back into apostolic times. The numerous accordances in the New Testament with all the clauses of the creed provide rich material for this hypothesis, though indeed always on the presupposition that underlying these separate scattered expressions is the type of a confession. com posed of three articles with a fuller treatment of the expressions about Christ in the second article. But it is just that which cannot be proved for the New Testament period and the beginning of the second century; hence the justification of this whole con struction is open to question. A. v. Harnack already more than once pointed out that, in addition to a three-fold confession of faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there existed a fully de veloped confession of Christ ; and that the form of the creed familiar to us was the outcome of the insertion of that Chris tological confession into the second article of a trinitarian creed which thus developed into the form of which we have evidence in the old Roman symbol. And in 1922 Reinhold Seeberg proposed the hypothesis that the original form of creed known to us from Rome arose about the year zoo in Jerusalem through the conflation of a christological and a trinitarian formula.
The study of the creeds, which had been undisturbed since the appearance of Kattenbusch's great work (1900), received a new shock from an enquiry which Karl Holl laid before the Berlin Academy in the year 1919. He pointed out that, in the Greek original text of the Roman creed, as in its old Latin translation, the clauses fell clearly into groups (see the text as printed above). After the words, "and in Christ Jesus, his only-begotten Son, our Lord" follow two expressions parallel in form, the first of which expounds the title "his only-begotten Son" according to Lk. i. 35 as he who is born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, whilst the second describes in the manner of Phil. ii. 5—II how Jesus obediently enters upon his passion and thereafter is exalted to the right hand of God and confessed as "Lord" by the whole world : so that in this way the second title "our Lord" is explained. A. v. Harnack recognized at once in this observation of Holl's a confirmation of his theory and drew the conclusion that thus the oldest form of the Roman creed did not have those explanatory sections and consisted of three equally-balanced articles, each of which was composed of three elements. H. Lietzmann then pointed out that this ninefold creed suspected by Harnack was actually preserved in the Egyptian Church and that there was evi dence for it in not a few passages ; and to this he joined a new hypothesis of the origin of the creed. The Egyptian. creed runs: I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, . And in Christ Jesus, his only-begotten Son, our Lord, And in the Holy Spirit, the holy Church, the resurrection of the flesh.
Thus it is only necessary to delete in the Roman creed the two expository clauses of the second article to obtain the Egyptian form, which research had hitherto regarded as an abbreviation of the Roman text. Now it became clear that on the contrary the development was from the shorter to the longer form, and new perspectives were thereby opened to research. As soon, namely, as it is inferred that the numerous confessional utterances of early Christian literature should be regarded, not as "allusions" to a creed lying behind them, but as actual confessions, there emerges the conception of a development moving from single utterances and brief forms to the creed formulas we know, and, this is in itself inherently probable.
In the early period are to be mentioned first of all the one-clause confessions of Jesus. Paul says in i Cor. xii. 3. "No man can say `Lord Jesus,' except by the Holy Spirit," and in Rom. x. 9: "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the "Lord Jesus" and shalt believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Here the confession runs quite simply : "Jesus is the Lord," and in Rom. x. 9 we can already observe the tendency to add the clause that God raised him from the dead. From this kernel was developed the formula, known to us from numerous sources and above all from the symbol of the fish : "Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour." The chance circumstance that the first letters of these five words when read together make the Greek word for fish (icthys) made the fish the emblem of the early Christians. In many other passages of New Testament and early Christian literature we meet with confessions of Christ : Rom. i. 3 ; 2 Tim. ii. 8 ; i Cor. xv. r Pet. iii. 13-22 and the famous passage Phil. ii. 5—I I which celebrates in hymn-like form the sav ing work of Christ.
For by confession ought not to be understood only some kind of formula expressing obligation, and not only at baptism does the Christian confess his faith, but early Christian usage speaks of "confessing" wherever the great truths of religion are uttered to the laud and praise of God or proclaimed to the hostile powers for the tonfusion of the demons. Thus we find, especially in the central prayer of the Eucharist in the oldest form of the western rite, the ceremonial confession of the saving work of Jesus. In the oldest Roman liturgy this prayer runs : We thank thee God through thy beloved servant Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent us in the last times as saviour and redeemer and messenger of thy counsel, the Logos proceeding from thee, through whom thou madest all things whom thou wast pleased to send from heaven into the womb of the virgin, and in her body he became flesh and was shown as thy Son, born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin. To fulfil thy will and to prepare a holy people, he stretched out his hands, for he suffered that he might release from evil those who have believed in thee.
And when he delivered himself up to voluntary suffering, to loose death and to break asunder the bands of the devil and to tread down hell and to illuminate the righteous and to set up the boundary stone and to reveal the resurrection, he took a loaf, gave thanks and spake: "Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you," etc.
The relationship of this prayer with passages like Phil. ii. 5-1 r on the one side and to the second article of the formulated creed on the other side is obvious. And the connection with the creed is no less clear in the early Church forms for exorcising evil spirits, e.g.: "I exorcise thee in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who became flesh in the virgin Mary, under whom the Father bath set all that is in heaven and on earth." By the side of this one-clause confession of Christ we find already in the earliest period a two-fold confession of God and Christ. Paul says in I Cor. viii. 6: One God the Father, from whom is all and we are to him.
And one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom is all and we are through him.
And in Tim. vi. 12 we read: of the good confession before many witnesses, Before God, who has called all into life And Christ Jesus, who under Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession.
We meet also with such two-fold confessions in early Christian writing again and again. Even so do Syrian martyrs make confession at a later time: We know no other God besides the God who made the heaven and the earth, and the sun and the moon and all that is visible and invisible.
And we believe in his Son Jesus, who is called the Nazarene.
Or an official confession of the leader of the community of Smyrna about 200 runs : we know truly of one God, we know of Christ, we know of the Son, who suffered as he suffered, died as he died and rose on the third day and is at the right hand of God and will come to judge the living and the dead.
These are no "allusions" to a three-fold creed, but actual two fold formulas of confession.
The oldest three-fold formula meets us in 2 Cor. xiii. 13 : "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellow ship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." And what we see here as a liturgical formula of salutation, meets us as a baptismal formula in Mt. xxviii. i: "Baptise ye in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." The letter of the Roman com munity dating from the end of the first century which goes by the name of the first epistle of Clement also knows this formula : "have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace which is poured out upon us and on calling in Christ?" (i Clem. xlvi. 6). This simple trinitarian formula was variously expanded just as was the two-fold one : the way is not far to the nine-fold Egyptian creed discussed above. Instructive in this connection, however, is a confession which occurs in the recently discovered so-called "Letter of the Apostles" preserved in Ethiopic and hence of second century origin. The five loaves of the miraculous feeding of Mt. xiv. I 7 are being discussed, and they are interpreted as a symbol of Christian faith: in the Father, the ruler of the whole world and in Jesus Christ our Saviour and in the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, and in the holy Church and in the forgiveness of sins.
We should say that here the third article of the trinitarian confes sion is expanded : but the author states clearly that he takes this formula of confession as a five-fold formula.
A four-fold formula meets us about the same period in bishop Irenaeus of Lyons (I. io). He there speaks of the faith : In one God, the Father, the Almighty, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them (Ps. cxlv. 6) , and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who foretold through the prophets the working of God and the coming and the birth of a virgin and the passion and the resurrection from the dead and the bodily ascension to heaven of the beloved Christ Jesus our Lord and his coming again out of the heavens in the glory of the Father to collect all together (Eph. i. io) and to raise up all flesh that he created, to give righteous judgement over all, etc.
Here can be plainly seen how a trinitarian confession to Father, Son and Spirit and a one-clause confession to Christ with extensive exposition of his saving work have grown together, but not in the form familiar to us from the Roman creed, but so that the confession to Christ-confession is added as a fourth article to the third one.
The abundant available material from the first three centuries teaches us above all that the early period of Christianity still possessed no definitely formulated confession, but gave to the Christian belief, which in content remained constant, the greatest variety of expression. And then when, in the 4th century and still later, as was acknowledged above, we find throughout the East a variety of confessional formulations to us almost amazing, we shall recognize in it the continuation of the early Christian free dom. A complete parallel to this is afforded by the development of the liturgy which likewise retained in the eastern Churches what to the Westerner is an almost incredible variety and freedom. And this parallel is no accidental one, for the creed also has its root in the liturgy and is nothing else than the liturgical expression of Christian faith. The trinitarian formula of confession especially belonged to the baptismal liturgy, whilst the fully elaborated Christ-confession was developed and fostered preferably in the central prayer of the Eucharist (see the example given above). In the West, and indeed predominantly in Rome, we can observe quite early the preference for fixed formulations, and this too in the field of the creedal confession; and analogously the liturgy there became stereotyped much earlier and more rigidly.
The creed is, therefore, by its origin a piece of the liturgy. It arose from the need to sum up the fundamental truths of salva tion in ceremonial form and to utter them aloud before the face of God; and this because the pious heart so desires it, because the solemnity of the hour demands it, because the celebration of the sacrament reaches in it its emotional climax or the assaults of the evil one are effectually withstood if rebuked in the very words of the faith. Whether also the exclusion of foreign errors exercised influence in the formation of individual clauses is an open question, which to-day will no longer be so confidently answered in the affirmative as would till recently have been the case. The determin ing impulses to the formation of the creed were in any case motives acting from within Christianity and the Church, i.e. the history of the creed and its formulations would not appear essentially dif ferent if there had been no heresies. It is with the council of Nicaea first that creeds enter our horizon compiled demonstrably and deliberately in defence against heretical opinions. But even after the 4th century this motive did not finally gain the upper hand, and the creed has remained through the middle ages to the present day an act of liturgical worship.
A typical example of creed formation for the purpose of con futing heretics is the so-called "Athanasian Creed," named after its opening word the Quicumque. Neither in content nor formally has it anything to do with the discussed so far, but is a com pendium, compiled in forty theses, of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. There is a variety of evidence of its liturgical use since the Carolingian period, and to be sure in the hourly services of the monks as a part of Prime. Opinions about the date of its origin differ very widely. There is only agreement on the one point that this creed, which is unknown to the Greek Church, can not come from S. Athanasius. Accordingly an author has been sought for in the West, and a great number of theologians have been suggested. Whilst earlier research, under the determining influence of Swainson, ascribed the work to the Carolingian period, A. E. Burn has with great learning argued for the thesis, often adopted before, that it originated in the 5th century, and he has looked for its author in Gaul. Finally in 19o9 the acute Jesuit Brewer attempted to render probable the authorship of S. Am brose, and won agreement from not a few competent scholars. In one of the last of his essays Burn also withdrew his earlier opinion and accepted the 4th century date and the probability of Brewer's hypothesis.