I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty. From there 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.

“My faith has found a resting place, not in device nor creed.” So goes the hymn, and if taken over-literally, we might agree. Our faith does not rest in a creed, or even in propositions that explain the gospel. Our faith rests upon the person and work of Jesus Christ, which the propositions of the gospel are essential to properly explain. This is partly what the ancient creeds do.

The ancient ecumenical creeds served as bulwarks against error, and rallying calls to orthodoxy. They demarcated the boundaries of the Christian faith, as defined in response to heresies present in those eras. In the early centuries, the heresies were particularly Christological and trinitarian ones, which is why the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds and Formula of Chalcedon focus on the person and nature of Christ and His relationship to the Father and the Spirit.

What is the use of creeds for those of us in the free worship tradition?

Several come to mind.

First, in an age of doctrinal vacillation and theological innovation, we can all do with regular reminders of some of the fundamentals of the faith. Granted, the creeds do not exhaustively cover every fundamental tenet of Christianity, but then no creed could. Fundamentals are only properly recognized when the gospel comes under threat in some way. We do not know how many ways the gospel may be denied, and in that sense, the fundamentals are not a bounded set. What the ancient creeds achieve are fairly concise statements of several doctrines fundamental to the faith: trinitarianism, the virgin birth, the deity and humanity of Christ, His crucifixion, resurrection, and return, the reality of future resurrection and judgment, the forgiveness of sins, and the existence of the church. These creeds, given their age, provide us with a fairly impressive sketch of the gospel, unchanged in seventeen centuries. Recited together, they are like a ‘pledge of allegiance’ to the gospel.

Second, in an age of amnesia regarding our Christian heritage, creeds state our solidarity with the saints triumphant. We recognize that the faith once delivered to the saints has been taught to faithful men, who taught others also, until it arrived in our hands. It is not as if the gospel has been in total eclipse until the last two hundred years or so. Creeds promote a “small-c” catholicity: we belong to the universal church – past, present, and future.

Of course, those in the free-church and Baptist traditions have some understandable concerns. Rightly used, creeds cannot be coercive statements which demand assent. They function rather like miniature summaries of Christian belief, to which any gospel-believing Christian could state as a concise statement of his own orthodox beliefs.

Finally, what of some of those difficult statements: “descended into hell”, “baptism for the remission of sins”, “holy catholic church”? These take some explaining, but they are hardly insurmountable obstacles. Even those of us who do not hold to baptismal regeneration can explain the baptism for the remission of sins using Acts 2:37. “Catholic” need not refer to the Roman church, but to the universal church. Catholic transliterates the Greek katholikos, which simply means universal. The phrase ‘descended into hell’ is missing from several ancient copies of the creed (see Wayne Grudem’s discussion of this), but even if we include it, we have Scriptures such as Acts 2:31 and 1 Peter 3:19 to explain this. The question is, is it worth all that explaining?

In my judgment, yes. What is gained in terms of “gospel-literacy”, catholicity, and sense of Christian patrimony is worth the effort. Whether they are read and recited together, or whether they are simply studied as a lesson, I heartily commend recovering some use of the ancient creeds.

The Creed’s Three Parts and the Trinity

One of the most obvious things about the creed is that it really comes in three parts: the part that begins with God the Father Almighty, the second part that begins with Jesus Christ His only Son, and the third part that begins with, we believe in the Holy Spirit. Although this is not a creed focused on the Trinity, it is obviously one of the earliest confessions that fundamental to Christian belief is the belief that the Christian God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is not a mere trifle, just seem piece of arcane theology that you don’t have to know. The Triune nature of God is fundamental to the gospel and to true Christianity. You cannot deny the Trinity and be a Christian.

What do we mean when we say that God is Triune or a Trinity?

When it comes to a God who is transcendent and unlike us, we usually begin by saying what we do not mean. Let me tell you a few things we do not mean.

• We do not mean something absurd or illogical. That is, we don’t believe that God is one and three in the same way. That is not what some people call a mystery. To say that 1 = 3 is not a mystery; it’s just nonsense. When we say God is one and three, we mean He is one in a certain way, and three in a different way.
• We do not mean that God has three forms He takes, one at a time, or three faces He may have one at a time. We do not mean that God sometimes takes the form of Father, and sometimes the form of Son, and sometimes the form of Spirit. This is a false teaching known as modalism or Sabellianism, still taught by some.
• We do not mean that the Father is God and that the Son and Spirit are lesser gods, or created gods, or something other than what the Father is.
• We do not mean there are three independent beings with separate wills, who happen to dwell together. That is simply a council of gods, or tritheism. God is not a council of gods or a conglomerate of gods.

What then do we believe? The Bible has seven statements affirmed throughout Scripture.

• The Father is completely and truly God.
• The Son is completely and truly God.
• The Spirit is completely and truly God.
• The Father is not the Son.
• The Son is not the Spirit.
• The Spirit is not the Father.
• There is only one God.

That’s the biblical data. In the Old Testament, what is affirmed repeatedly is that there is only one self-existent, self-sufficient, eternal, and infinite God who has created everything. Israel’s Shema repeats Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Monotheism: one God.

But what many people miss is that this monotheism is focused on uniqueness, not singleness. Israel was to confess that Yehovah alone is God, and that there is no other God but He. In fact, the word for one is echad, which is a word used for plural unity. Adam and his wife became echad one flesh, but they were still two persons.

Alongside this focus on Israel’s God being the only God, there are hints that this one God dwells in some kind of plurality. The very word for God, Elohim – is a plural word, it is literally, Gods. God’s name, Yehovah, is a combination of three forms of the Hebrew word which means to be: Strictly speaking, this name is a combination of three forms of this Hebrew root: Hayah “He was,” Hoveh, “He is,” and Yihyeh. “He will be.” The name of God is a trinity of meaning the One who was, who is, and who is to come, which is what is sung of God in Revelation 4:8.

We find moments where God speaks of Himself in the plural, Let us make man in our image. We find the angel of the Lord, who speaks for God, but also speaks as God. When He judges Sodom in Genesis 19:24, we read:

Then the LORD rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the LORD out of the heavens. (Genesis 19:24)

And then we find the strange predictions that Messiah will be man and God. Micah 5:2 tells us he will be born in Bethlehem, but His goings have been from eternity. Isaiah 9:6 says that this child who is born is named the Mighty God and father of eternity.

The Old Testament allows for the Trinity.

But it is with the coming of Jesus that we now have a full revelation that the God of Israel has always dwelt in three persons. Especially in John 14 to 17, Jesus teaches that all three are Persons, you can say He of Father, Son, and Spirit. Each one has mind, affections, will, personhood.

He tells us to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and at his baptism there was the Son being baptized, the voice of the Father, and the Spirit descending.

Peter, Paul, John, James, Jude, all write of the three persons as being fully God, and yet there being one God. They are not three parts of God, 33.3 % of God, nor are they separately three Gods. One God, one being, but three Persons of whom we can say He.

How do we understand this?

C. S. Lewis reminded us of why it is difficult. A one dimension shape is a line. Two dimensions is a combination of lines to make height and width. A three dimensional cube is a combination of 2 dimensional squares. But if you were a 1 dimensional line you couldn’t really understand what was meant by a 2 dimensional shape, much less a cube. If you were a 2-dimensional man, who lived in length and width, you would not be able to really understand the third dimension. As you advance in dimensions, you include the previous ones, but the simpler one can’t really understand the advanced ones. We understand life as one being and one person. We have a faint idea in marriage how two persons can in a sense be one, and in their union, there can be a child, a third. But life where three persons can be one being is beyond our full perception.

In God, there has always been God Beholding Himself, God Beheld, And God Delighting in what He Beholds.

The closest way we can understand how this works is to take the words of Jesus. In John, Jesus describes what theologians have called perichoresis. It means mutual indwelling. Jesus keeps saying that the Father is in Him, and He is in the Father. The three persons are in one another, the way your soul and spirit is in you. If your soul left your body, it would die, so if any of the three did not indwell each other, there would be no God, nor would any of the others continue to exist as God.

For God to be God it necessarily means for Him to be triune.

Why is this part of the gospel?

First of all, because this is who God is revealed to be. Once we know the Messiah, we know God is three. We cannot pretend He has not revealed Himself to us in this way.

Second, because the work of salvation requires the triune working of God. The Father sent the Son. The Son came and paid the penalty to the Father. The Spirit empowered the Son and raised Him from the dead, and applies His work to those who believe. Without the Trinity, there is no gospel.

Third, without the Trinity, there is no love. To say God is love does not make sense if you have an eternal being who was completely alone for all eternity. But to say that God has always been Lover, Beloved and Love, Beholder, Beautiful and Beauty now makes sense of this idea. It also means that the God of Israel, the true Creator is wonderfully joyful and beautiful. He has been infinitely happy and glorious in Himself, and has overflowed to make beings that will come to share in His own union.

Fourth, we worship all three. In song, in prayer, in devotion, we praise and speak to each one, we speak to all in unison, and we praise Yehovah, the Triune God.