A Creed for Easter

Even at Easter, Mark Palmer was unsure about the Resurrection. And then the former Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to his father-in-law...

Acouple of years ago, my 88-year-old father-in-law, Noel, received a letter from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, wishing him well for a major heart operation.

They did not know each other but Dr Williams had heard about the operation from a mutual friend and, generously, felt moved to remind Noel of ‘God’s faithfulness in all things’.

Noel wrote back and thanked Dr Williams. But he didn’t stop there. ‘I once had the temerity to rephrase the Nicene Creed in words which I felt expressed my faith and I am attaching it here,’ wrote Noel, adding, ‘It is probably heinously sacrilegious but I hope God will accept it.’

Dr Williams liked it, saying, ‘I thought your rewrite of the Creed was a very beautiful rendering, making it clear why such propositions matter.’

I was pleased because Noel and I had often discussed how we stumble over the Creed, the symbol of faith used in Christian liturgy, with its familiar opening, ‘I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.’

Creed comes from credo, the Latin for those first two words, ‘I believe’.

The Creed is the one part of a service (along with the sharing of the peace, if it involves hugging strangers) that leaves me uncomfortable. I don’t not believe in the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection, but I can’t say I believe it either, as the Creed demands.

I know that’s where faith comes in. But I’ve long taken the view that uncertainty and tolerance are good for each other.

So I go all quiet at the Creed, fidgeting with my service sheet and wondering if my wife has remembered to put the roast potatoes on. Better that, surely, than pretending.

It’s a problem for many people – not least Maureen, the Oldie reader who wrote to the Ask Virginia column in the December issue. Maureen was about to get married to an ardent churchgoer who wanted her to attend church with him. But she couldn’t be doing with the ‘rigmarole of the Creed’ and thought the idea of Christ being risen was ‘totally ridiculous’.

I would suggest that, like Noel, she comes up with her own Creed and settles her mind on it whenever the congregation pipes up ‘I believe…’

After all, the Pope wants to change the Lord’s Prayer from ‘Lead us not into temptation’ to ‘Don’t let me fall into temptation’ – because, as he recently said, ‘It’s Satan [not God] who leads us into temptation; that’s his department.’

Yes, the evangelical crowd will take a dim view of personalising the Creed. But there’s no need to let fundamentalism destroy the fundamentals of Christianity. These are surely rooted in the affirmation that all that is best and highest in man, as typified in the person of Jesus, is often persecuted and seemingly destroyed – yet is in fact indestructible and does perennially ‘rise again’ triumphant.

One of my heroes is Dr Leslie Weatherhead, the Methodist minister and liberal theologian who preached at City Temple, Holborn, from 1936 until 1960. He suggested that those who wrestle with trickier Christian conceits should pop them in a mental box labelled ‘awaiting further light’.

Weatherhead said the manner of Jesus’s birth mattered not at all and that the Creed’s ‘begotten not made’ reference contains dangers ‘no less grave than those against which it was intended to guard’.

The original creed, the Nicene Creed of 325AD, was intended to be a unifying doctrinal statement to see off the threat of Arius, a Christian priest from Libya, and his followers. Two factions argued whether the Son is homoousios – ‘of the same substance’ as the Father, or homoiousios – of a similar substance to the Father. The difference between the two – a single ‘i’ – led to the expression ‘one iota of difference’.

Arius, Weatherhead and my father-in-law would have got on famously in their shared uncertainty about the Creed. So, here is Noel’s credo, in all its woolly glory:

‘I believe in God, the “Word in the Beginning”, the spiritual source of all creation and goodness, the measure of all value and virtue, omnipotent and eternal, who hears our prayers and forgives our sins when we truly repent; and in Jesus Christ, who was at one with God and acted with the authority of God, begotten of Mary in absolute purity; who lived and taught humanity as a human himself but with divine wisdom and power.

‘He suffered and allowed himself to be crucified under Pontius Pilate to expiate the sins of mankind; he died but after three days he was reabsorbed into God’s spiritual world. He left mankind the Holy Spirit as intermediary, the divine catalyst for God’s continuing intervention and guidance of mankind.

‘I believe in human conscience and moral responsibility, the need to respect the rights of all lives, the virtue of self-sacrifice, as Jesus Christ taught us, and in the reconciliation of conflict through Christ’s wisdom and love.

‘I belong to God’s holy Christian Church and worship Him in communion with the saints; I seek his forgiveness and guidance in spiritual communion and I pray that such communion may endure beyond my death.’

Who knows? Perhaps it might chime with you this Easter.

‘Your rewrite of the Creed was a very beautiful rendering’ rowan williams