TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 9th January 2022), in which I introduce our new series on the Apostles’ Creed. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel.

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READ: 1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-9

WHEN THE WINDS CHANGE

What we believe matters.

When I was younger, my mum used to tell me off for pulling faces. According to my mum, you shouldn’t pull faces—not because it was wrong, but because if the wind changed direction whilst you were pulling a face, then your face would stick like that.

I believed her.

I should also let you know that, when I was very young, I wanted a cleft in my chin. I also wanted the very dignified raised-eyebrow look of Roger Moore. And so, I put my belief into practice.

I have never told anyone this, but I spent a good amount of time sitting in my bedroom, alone, pinching my chin together, to form a cleft, and raising one eyebrow slightly higher than the other, hoping that the wind would change direction.

Of course, I never got the cleft chin or the debonair look of Roger Moore, even though the direction of the wind changed numerous times. And yet, that belief did change me, it influenced me.

Beliefs matter. They can be foolish, like believing your face will stick if the wind changes. They can be futile. But they can also be fruitful and not fictitious. And they are always foundational to who we are and who we are becoming.

It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you are religious or not, we all have beliefs—about society, about our world; about others, about ourselves; about today and tomorrow. We have convictions and opinions about everything; some are shallow, some are deeply rooted, and they define us. They set our priorities. They shape our worldview. They guide our reasoning and our actions.

Yes, the basis of some of our beliefs can be hearsay and speculation. Yes, some beliefs are formed by facts and by our actual experiences of the world as it is and the realities of life. Some of them are shaped by our hopes for something other than what we have experienced or are experiencing.

And yes, the reality is that our beliefs can and do change, and they often change direction more quickly than the wind does.

But whoever we are, we are all believers.               

SOMETHING, SOMEONE, OR SOMETHINGS ABOUT SOMEONE?

To say that I am a Christian is to admit that I am a believer; I believe something.

To be more precise, I don’t merely believe something or somethings.

Christianity is not, and has never been a case of some mental assent to a list of propositions. Our faith is not in a set of truth statements. To say I am a Christian means that I have put my trust in, and have given my allegiance to Jesus.

In other words, I believe in someone.

As the famous preacher Charles Spurgeon put it, “Our faith is a Person. The gospel that we have to preach is a Person. And go wherever we may, we have something solid and tangible to preach. If you had asked the twelve apostles, in their day, ‘What do you believe in?’ they would not have needed to go round about with a long reply, but they would have pointed to their Master, and they would have said, ‘We believe Him.’

‘But what are your doctrines?’ ‘There they stand incarnate [in the flesh].’ ‘But what is your practice?’ ‘There, stands our practice. He is our example.’ ’What, then, do you believe?’ Hear ye the glorious answer of the apostle Paul: ‘We preach Christ crucified [1 Cor 2:2].’

Our creed, our body of divinity, our whole theology is summed up in the person of Christ Jesus. The apostle [Paul] preached doctrine; but the doctrine was Christ. He [Paul] preached practice; but the practice was all in Christ.

There is no summary of the faith of a Christian that can compass all he believes, except that word Christ. And that is the Alpha and the Omega of our creed, that is the first and the last rule of our practice– Christ, and Him crucified.

To spread the faith, then, is to spread the knowledge of Christ crucified. It is, in fact, to bring men, through the agency of God’s Spirit, to feel their need of Christ, to seek Christ, to believe in Christ, to love Christ, and then to live for Christ.”[i]

I couldn’t agree more with the passion and direction of Spurgeon’s words.

The problem is, we could hear words like those and wrongly conclude that we don’t need things like creeds that summarise our beliefs, thinking they just confuse and complicate things, and distract us, and cause harmful and unnecessary divisions.

To be fair, this can be the case. Used the wrong way, summaries of faith can be harmful. And we do, as a church globally, have an inclination to be tribal and elitist; both ancient and modern statements of faith have been used for such purposes. So, I am sympathetic to the all-we-need-is-Jesus approach.

Yet, there has to be more to it than that?

Surely, it is not enough to say that I believe in someone; in Jesus. Because I’m still left with the question, Who is Jesus?

When someone says to me that Jesus was a space-man, or someone from the future—well, I don’t believe that. That’s pure fantasy! When someone says to me that they think Jesus is just a myth and was not a historical person—well, based on the evidence, I don’t agree with that. When someone says Jesus was a just and good man, who taught and lived some really good and wise principles that we can live by—well, that’s good, but I also believe there’s more to it than that.

So to be even more precise than I was before, to say I am a Christian is not a matter of believing somethings. And it’s not the whole picture to say that I believe in someone (although, I have given my allegiance to Jesus). The fuller picture is that I have put my trust in someone because of the somethings that we know about that person.

Even Spurgeon, who I’ve quoted, wasn’t against creeds. The purpose of his words was not to bash summaries of faith. Spurgeon’s purpose was to point us back to a historical reality; to point us back to the stories of the Jesus event that have been passed on to us, in order to direct us into a living relationship with Jesus so that we can also experience something about that someone.

If we only looked closer at Spurgeon’s few words, it is crystal clear that he believed somethings about this someone called Jesus. He believed Jesus existed, for a start. He believed Jesus had disciples (people who learn’t from Jesus, not only words, but a way); He believed Jesus was crucified; He believed that God was incarnate in Jesus and that God had achieved something through Jesus—something that the world needed and needed to know.

Spurgeon believed some important things about someone, that meant putting your trust in that someone was an important thing to do.

As Tom Wright puts it, ‘Christianity isn’t a set of ideas. It isn’t a path of spirituality. It isn’t a rule of life. It isn’t a political agenda. It includes, and indeed gives energy to, all those things; but at it’s very heart it is something different. It is good news about an event which has happened in the world, an event because of which the world can never be the same again. And those who believe it, and live by it, will never be the same again either.’[ii]

Christians believe somethings about someone: that this someone did somethings and said somethings that have changed everything.

GNOSTIC THREATS

Paul the Apostle was the same. When Paul wrote this letter to the church in Corinth, and he speaks about Jesus, he is referring to a particular person, a particular history, a particular set of events, a particular past that this set of particular events belongs to, and a particular future hope these particular events have now launched into creation.

In other words, Paul believed somethings about Jesus—things that mattered. Things that the Corinthians were purposefully sidelining, forgetting, and casting off as unnecessary baggage. Things Paul said were foundational, that their faith was built upon (1 Cor 3:11, 1 Cor 15:1).

Even though it had only been a short time after the events of Jesus (thirty years at the most, when Paul wrote this letter), distortions to Jesus’ story were already creeping in.

For the Corinthians, they were getting very uncomfortable about the cross—the idea that God became human, that God experienced such a humiliating death, that God emptied himself, that God suffered (see 1 Cor 1:18-2:5). They were also uncomfortable with the idea of the resurrection (1 Cor 15).

They were struggling with these things for a number of reasons. But one factor, in the background of all of this, is that some early forms of Gnosticism had begun to infect the story of Jesus.

I know Gnosticism is a strange term—but it will crop up a few times as we go through this series, and it is important, so forgive me for taking a moment to explain it. As a rough summary, and there is more to this, Gnostics saw all matter (all the created world) as evil. They had strange ideas about how the world came about—that it wasn’t the work of the real God, but a false god. What mattered to the real God, they said, was the soul, the spirit, and God was about freeing these imprisoned spirits from their material prisons.[iii]

When these ideas influenced Christians, then ideas of God as the maker of the world, the idea of God becoming incarnate (bodily, in flesh, a part of creation), the idea of God suffering physically on a cross, the idea of bodily resurrection, and the idea of the restoration of creation became unpalatable. They didn’t want to believe those somethings about Jesus.

So it’s no surprise that Paul bangs on, in his letter, about the “foolishness” of the cross (which implies God’s incarnation and suffering, in 1 Cor 1:18-2:2), and the importance of resurrection (1 Cor 15), along with many other things.[iv]

Not only this, but Paul wants the church to know that he is not the inventor of this story. These things were not his spin or interpretation of the Jesus story; these were plot points of the Jesus story, plot points others witnessed. At several points in this letter, Paul plainly tells them that he is only passing on what he has received (1 Cor 11:2, 23; 1 Cor 15:3).

As it is worded in what we have read together, ‘I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me.’ (1 Cor 15:3).

For Paul, there were important things to be remembered, things that had to be passed on.

PASSING MEMORIES

I don’t know if you have ever thought about it this way, but Christianity is all about memory, and passing on memory.

That is not to say this memory is passed in a swallow-this-without-thinking fashion. Every generation has the task of handling this memory, looking into it, exploring it. Even Paul, in the passage we’ve read, doesn’t just force memory onto these people; he attempts to reason with them, he wants them to think it through and explore it, and experience it in the now.

But as a theologian and ethicist, called Allen Verhey put it, ‘There is no identity without memory, and there is no community without common memory.’[v]

Christians are a community of common memory.

Passing on memory has always been central. It’s why we have the New Testament writings, ultimately—to cut a long story short.

It’s also why we have creeds: summaries and formulas telling us important things about this Jesus, and about the something that has happening through this Jesus. We’ve always had creeds—even in the early church. Theses summaries were easy to remember and they captured a ‘grassroots, indigenous confession’ of the risen Christ.[vi]

You may or may not be aware of this; but the writings of the New Testament includes some early church creeds:

Paul has just quoted one, ‘that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures…’. (1 Cor 15:3b-5, NET)[vii]

There’s also one in Philippians 2, when Paul quotes these words; ‘who, though he was in the form of God / did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited / but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. / And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. / Therefore God also highly exalted him / and gave him the name that is above every name / so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth / and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ (Phil 2:6-11, NRSV)

And there’s many more. For example: Romans 1:3-4, Romans 10:9, 1 Cor. 8:6, 1 Cor. 12:3, 2 Cor. 13:13, Col 1: 15-20, 2 Timothy 2:11-13, 1, Timothy 3:16.

As Alister McGrath points out, the simplest early church creed seems to have been ‘Jesus is Lord’ (Romans 10:9, 1 Cor 12:3, 2 Cor 4:5, Phil 2:11).[viii]

THE APOSTLES’ CREED

Outside of the New Testament, the earliest creeds we have are iterations of what eventually became known as the Apostle’s Creed. It comes, we think, from some ancient church baptism rites, and by around the second century, basic versions of this creed were already widespread.[ix]

One reason it existed is that, as Paul had to tackle in Corinth, Gnostic ideas continued their attempt to distort doctrine. When reading this creed, you’ll notice how creation-affirming it is. It purposefully recalls that God is the maker of heaven and earth. It wants us to know about the incarnation, and Jesus’ death and bodily resurrection. It wants us to know that the Holy Spirit is still here, working with and through the matter of the world. And it wants us to know about the resurrection of our bodies and life (embodied life) everlasting.[x]

The Apostle’s Creed goes like this (read together):

I believe in God the Father almighty,

maker 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 the Father,

and 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 the life everlasting.

Amen.

Like Philippians 2 (above), you will notice that this creed has a prayerful rhythm to it. You will also notice that it is not so much about “doctrine” (in the sense of interpreting meaning), it is more about repeating some plot points from the story.

As part of the baptism rite, the creed was used as basic guide to the substance of this Jesus-shaped story and to the interpretation of Scripture.

As Ben Myer’s points out in his book on the Apostle’s Creed (a book that we will follow in this series), the intention was that those led by this basic guide ‘would see Scripture as a unified witness to one God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And they would see the created world as the domain of God’s activity: God creates our world, becomes incarnate in it, and will ultimately redeem it fully in the resurrection of the dead.’[xi]

That’s also why I want us to spend some time, over a series of weeks, journeying through this creed—using it as a guide, helping us to understand what has been passed onto us, looking at the somethings about this someone.

MAPPING A PROBLEM

But there’s a problem we all need to be aware of. A problem that is more to do with us and how we use creeds, than with the Creed itself.

Creeds were not intended replacements for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospels contain more than what the creed says. It is a guide—and pretends to be no more.

They are also not a substitute for faith. To use this creed as a tick list is to misuse it. None of us became Christian by knowing or reciting this creed. It is also highly probable that many of the things spoken in this creed were unfamiliar to us when we came to faith, and may still be unfamiliar. For many of us, our response to Christ was based on what we did understand at the time of our decision: that God loves us and has called us into a relationship with the Divine. We certainly did not have to wait until we knew it all, until we had are ‘theological ducks’ in a row, before we could call ourselves followers or disciples. And it’s also worth stating that God wasn’t waiting for us to understand it all, either! However, being a follower does acknowledge that there is learning before us, that there is a journey ahead of us.

The best way to think of this creed, then, is being akin to a map. And to borrow an analogy from Eugene Peterson, ‘[maps] don’t pretend to substitute the country for itself. Studying the map [and knowing all its features] doesn’t provide experience of the country. The purpose of the map is to show us the way into the country and prevent us from getting lost in our travels.’[xii]

Again, it is a guide—a guide into this vast landscape we entered into when we put our trust in Christ.

If I was to put that another way, the Creed is a teaser—it’s inviting us beyond itself into a bigger journey of exploration.

The header image for this series comes from the The Saint John’s Bible (saintjohnsbible.org), illustration taken from the book of Genesis.

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[i] Charles H. Spurgeon, C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, Vol. 2 (1856-1878), eds. Susannah Spurgeon and Joseph Harrald (New York: Fleming Revell Co., 1899/ Nabu Press, 2010).

[ii] Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (commentary of 1 Corinthians 151-11), p. 206

[iii] Gnosticism certainly varied over time and place—maybe a better term would be Gnosticisms, as various sects emerged that displayed similar ‘gnostic’ traits. For more on Gnosticism, and it’s influence on the early church, see The Early Church, by Henry Chadwick, chapter entitled Faith and Order.

[iv] Refuting early gnostic leanings may also be in the background to Paul’s powerful words in Romans 8:18-24, where God’s creation anticipates in freedom from death and decay. There is also a defence against Gnosticism flavouring 1 and 2 John (were John has to emphasise the importance of Jesus being the Christ and Jesus becoming flesh). Along with other motives, it’s also in the background to John’s gospel, which speaks not only of Jesus being eternal and divine, but equally a very fleshy human, who gets tired, who eats, and who weeps. A gospel that also, throughout its narrative, purposefully echoes the creation account of Genesis in order to affirm creation as God’s work and witnesses to God’s continued work within it (through God dwelling bodily with us, in the flesh) in order to restore it.

[v] Allen Verhey, The Great Reversal: Ethics and the New Testament, p. 184

[vi] ‘grassroots, indigenous confession’ comes from Ben Myers’ book, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism. Myer’s applies this description to the Apostles’ Creed itself (as it wasn’t derived by any council, unlike like later creeds, such as the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed), but I feel this description is equally applicable to the creeds recited in the text of the New Testament.

[vii] It is also interesting that this particular pre-testament creed finds itself appearing in 1 Corinthians. I do not think Paul’s tactic of quoting this is incidental. If early Gnostic influences were spreading in the Corinthian believers, with the gnostic emphasis on secret ‘in-the-know’ knowledge, it’s imperative to note that Paul tackles this spiritual elitism by leaning on passed-on tradition (I.e. doctrine and teaching that was general knowledge among all believers). Paul could have appealed to his own experience of revelation (as he does in Galatians 1), but such an appeal would have only strengthened his opponent’s perspective of ‘special knowledge’. It is worth pointing this out, as Paul has sometimes (wrongly) been labelled as gnostic due to his mention of revelation (as in Galatians 1 and 2 Corinthians 12). But this neglects Paul’s many uses of tradition and pre-testament creeds (as well as his appeal and allusion to the Scriptures).

[viii] Alister McGrath, ‘I Believe’: Exploring the Apostle’s Creed, Introduction.

[ix] An example can be found in the early second century: A Greek bishop called Irenaeus, working in Gaul (southern France, today), wrote a treaty called Against Heresies, in order to tackle, once again, Gnostic ideas that were corrupting the Christian story. Within his letter he states the following: ‘[The Church believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit…’, (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.10.1). There’s also a later development of this creed in a fourth century creed known as the ‘Old Roman Creed’.

[x] Along with Henry Chadwick (see note iii, above), J. I. Packer, in the introduction of his book, Affirming the Apostle’s Creed, also briefly touches on the influence of Gnosticism in the formulation of the creed.

[xi] Ben Myers, The Apostle’s Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, p. 4.

[xii] Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Introduction, p. 8 (hardback). I should be clear that Peterson uses this analogy in the context of the Holy Trinity, not the Apostles’ Creed. But I think the analogy of a map works here, also.