difficulties with a modest proposal, 2: creeds

a good friend asked me yesterday if sometime i could explain to her my faith and my hope, thinking it would take some time and be very personal. i was probably somewhat disappointing. i said i am boringly orthodox, that my faith is expressed, as well as i think inadequate words can express such things, in the nicene creed (although i would lose the "and from the son" in the clause about the holy spirit, following the original wording), and that my hope is best expressed in a collect from the gelesian sacramentary, an eighth century collection of prayers, used in the easter vigil:

"o god of unchangeable power and eternal light: look
favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred
mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry
out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world
see and know that things which were cast down are being
raised up, and things which had grown old are being made
new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection
by him through whom all things were made, your son jesus
christ our lord. amen." (bcp 1979, p. 285)

the american episcopal church's bishops, meeting in chicago in 1886, agreed with my accepting "the nicene creed as the sufficient statement of the christian faith." (bcp 1979, p. 877). the bishops of the church of england, meeting at lambeth two years later, modified that position slightly, including "the apostles' creed, as the baptismal symbol; and the nicene creed, as the sufficient
statement of the christian faith." (loc. cit.)

as simple as that change is, it opens up a fairly large door in our understanding of church unity. the "baptismal symbol," as lambeth called the apostles' creed, is very ancient, being used apparently as a dialogue between the one performing the baptism and the one being baptised, at least as early as the second century (see my earlier blog post, circle of prayer 24a). as the link to that creed suggests, it is widely accepted by the "reformed church," although it was apparently not used in worship except at baptism until around the twelth century.

nor was the nicene widely used in the west before 1014, although it was used from the fifth century in constantinople and from the late sixth century in spain. it has, however, come to be a central part of the eucharistic worship of much of the church.

the problem is not that the two creeds disagree in any way, but that the one says so much more than the latter. one is a symbol of baptismal unity, a source of christian unity accepted by nearly all of the church, which, with the exception of some orthodox and some congregational bodies, do not "rebaptize" those who come to them from other parts of the church. the other, which might be a source of eucharistic unity, tends to be accepted only with the insistance that one coming to the table agrees with the interpretation, often very precisely, of the communion whose table it is.

we may say in the nicene creed that "we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins," but we do not quite consider baptism as making us fully members of "the one holy catholic and apostolic church."