The church’s theological shoulders.
The church’s theological shoulders.
What today’s church needs to recover if it intends to persevere.
In a letter to his philosophical rival Robert Hooke in the 1670s, renowned physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton famously quipped, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” (Brewster, 1.142). The achievements, endeavors, and sacrifices of those in bygone eras constitute the platforms on which each successive generation has been established and from which each has progressed. This, of course, is abundantly true of Christ’s church, the existence of which is defined by a litany of stalwart voices and thinkers of the past from whom present-day believers are still gleaning. The breadth of Christianity’s theological shoulders can be observed nowhere better than by examining some of the earliest ecclesiastical councils and the creeds that derived from them. Indeed, two of the earliest creeds — the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed — endure as robust yet concise encapsulations of trenchant theological truth.
Despite the age of these two creeds, the so-called “Apostles’ Creed” and the more accurately termed the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed constitute some of the most influential articulations of Christian doctrine apart from Scripture ever recorded. Although not a direct product of the apostles themselves, the Apostles’ Creed, which can dated as far back as 140 A.D., is an obvious assimilation of the foremost doctrines that define the body of Christ. Philip Schaff, a 19th-century Protestant theologian and historian, once referred to it as “the Creed of creeds” (1.14). Similarly, the Councils of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and Constantinople in 381 A.D. and the creed to which they gave birth remains a premier example of precise theological development. Both creeds loom large in the doctrine identity of the modern church whose understanding of the Trinity and the identity of Christ have been somewhat shaken by the postmodern entanglement with philosophical skepticism and epistemological relativism.
Consequently, a faithful retrieval of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed is warranted if today’s church intends to persevere through the glut and bombardment of disbelief and cynicism. This pair of ecclesiastical creeds offer meticulous biblical statements of faith that succinctly yet assuredly attest to the God who is three in one and insist upon the paradoxical identity of the Son of God who is both fully human and fully divine. These are not esoteric affirmations of a bygone era. Rather, they are timeless declarations of faith that imbue the body of Christ with hope and assurance in the gospel of salvation that baptizes sinners “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19). Despite how fragile the present may seem, the church of Christ is made to embrace an even more tenuous future as it is rooted in the biblical testimony of the gospel and seated upon the theological shoulders of its forebears.
Works cited:
David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Vols. 1–2 (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1855).
Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, Vols. 1–3 (New York: Harper Bros., 1877).