The Creed
At Mass, after the Scripture readings and homily, the Creed is professed. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” and so on.
The Creed was not always part of the Mass. It began as part of the baptismal rite and was only gradually inserted into the Mass over the centuries. What’s interesting, though, is the precise moment in the Mass where the Creed was inserted.
The Creed is part of the Liturgy of the Word, the long part of the Mass where the Scriptures are proclaimed. On a typical Sunday, there’s a reading from the Old Testament, the Psalms, one of the New Testament letters, and also the Gospels. The homily then expounds upon these readings. But then there’s the Creed, and this too is part of the Liturgy of the Word. Isn’t this strange though? The Creed is not in Scripture. Why is it part of the Liturgy of the Word?
In short, it’s because the Creed summarizes the Scriptures ― not only the few readings which were just proclaimed, but all of Scripture. Indeed, across the weeks and years, an entire library of Scriptural texts is proclaimed at Mass. These texts tell us about God. They tell us what he’s like and how he engages with his people. The Creed, in its turn, synthesizes it all. It is the Christian tradition’s synopsis or distilled outline of what the whole of the Scriptures reveal to us about God and his mysteries. “What the Scriptures say at length,” the British theologian Nicholas Lash remarked, “the creed says briefly.”1
But that means the Creed is also an interpretation of the Scriptures. That makes sense when we think of where Creeds come from. At Mass, we normally say the Nicene Creed, the formula which emerged from contentious debates at the fourth-century Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. But all these debates were really about just one thing: how should we interpret the Bible when it talks about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and all the rest?
The Gospel of John, for instance, describes Jesus as “the only begotten of the Father” (Jn 1:14). Can someone who’s begotten still be called God? Or is Jesus best understood as a creature, someone made like the rest of us are made? On the other hand, the very first words of John’s Gospel insist that Jesus, even “in the beginning,” was “with God” and “was God” (Jn 1:1). If he’s been God from the beginning, how could he be a creature, made like we are made?
These are difficult questions. In fact, these were the very questions which prompted the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The debates were contentious and the Creed that emerged was hard won. The legends say punches were thrown. At Mass today, though, when we assert in the Creed that Jesus is “begotten” but “not made” and that he is “consubstantial [of the same substance] with the Father,” we are reciting the hard-earned solutions to these questions about Scripture.
But that’s just the point: the debates which produced these Creeds were about how to interpret the Bible. This is why the Creed is part of the Liturgy of the Word in today’s Masses. The Creed is not a mere outline of propositions Christians believe, handed down in a vacuum. The Creed, rather, is a recapitulation, in careful language, of the essential core of how Christians have interpreted the Bible through the centuries, especially its trickiest passages.
Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles Creed (London: SCM Press, 1992), 8.