The Picture Of Christ In The Early Church: The Apostles’ Creed
Even before the Gospels were written, Christians were reflecting upon the meaning of what Jesus had been and what he had said and done. It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that such reflection is a later accretion upon the simple message of the Gospels. On the contrary, the early Christian communities were engaged in witness and worship from the very beginning. The forms of that witness and worship were also the forms of the narratives in the Gospel accounts. From this fact it follows that to understand the Gospel accounts regarding Jesus we must consider the faith of the early church regarding Christ. In this sense it is valid to maintain that there is no distinction between “the Jesus of history” and “the Christ of faith” and that the only way to get at the former is by the latter. Christology, the doctrine about Christ, is then as old as Christianity itself.
To comprehend the faith of the early church regarding Christ, we must turn to the writings of the New Testament, where that faith found embodiment. It was also embodied in brief confessions or creeds, but those have not been preserved for us complete in their original form. What we have are fragments of those confessions or creeds in various books of the New Testament, snatches from them in other early Christian documents, and later forms of them in Christian theology and liturgy. The so-called Apostles’ Creed is one such later form. It did not achieve its present form until quite late; just how late is a matter of controversy. But in its earliest ancestry it is very early indeed, perhaps dating back to the 1st century. And its confession regarding Christ is probably the earliest core around which later elaborations of it were composed. Allowing for such later elaboration, it may be said that in the Apostles’ Creed there is a convenient summary of what the early church believed about Christ amid all the variety of its expression and formulation. The creeds were a way for Christians to explain what they meant by their acts of worship. When they put “I believe” or “We believe” at the head of what they confessed about God and Christ, they meant that their declarations rested upon faith, not merely upon observation.
Preexistence
The statement “I believe” indicated that Christ was deserving of worship and faith and that he was therefore on a level with God. At an early date, possibly as early as the words of Paul in the second chapter of Philemon (verses 6–11), Christian theology began to distinguish three stages in the career of Jesus Christ: his preexistence with the Father before all things; his Incarnation and humiliation in “the days of His flesh” (Hebrews 5:7); and his glorification, beginning with the Resurrection and continuing forever.
Probably the most-celebrated statement of the preexistence of Christ is the opening verses of the Gospel According to John. There Christ is identified as the Incarnation of the Word (Logos) through which God made all things in the beginning, a Word existing in relation to God before the Creation. The sources of that doctrine have been sought in Greek philosophy, both early and late, as well as in the Jewish thought of Philo and of the Palestinian rabbis. Whatever its source, the doctrine of the Logos in John is distinctive by virtue of the fact that it identifies the Logos with a specific historical person. Other writings of the New Testament also illustrate the faith of the early Christians regarding the preexistence of Christ. The opening chapters of both Colossians and Hebrews speak of Christ as the preexistent one through whom all things were created, therefore as distinct from the created order of things in both time and preeminence. The preposition before in the first chapter of Colossians apparently refers to both his temporal priority and his superior dignity. Yet, before any theological reflection about the nature of that preexistence had been able to find terms and concepts, the early Christians were worshipping Christ as divine. The passage from Philemon mentioned above may be a quotation from a hymn used in such worship. Theological reflection told them that if this worship was legitimate, he must have existed with the Father “before all ages.”
Jesus Christ
By the time the text of the creed was established, Jesus Christ was the usual designation for the Saviour. Originally, of course, Jesus had been his given name, meaning “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh will save” (Matthew 1:21), while Christ was the Greek translation of the title Messiah. Some passages of the New Testament still used Christ as a title (e.g., Luke 24:26; 2 John 7), but it is evident from Paul’s usage that the title became simply a proper name very early. Most of the Gentiles took it to be a proper name, and it was as “Christians” that the early believers were labelled (Acts 11:26). In the most-precise language, the term “Jesus” was reserved for the earthly career of the Lord, but it seems from liturgical sources that it may actually have been endowed with greater solemnity than the name “Christ.” Within a few years after the beginnings of the Christian movement, the names Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, and Christ Jesus could be used almost interchangeably, as the textual variants in the New Testament indicate. Only in modern times has it become customary to distinguish sharply among them for the sake of drawing a line between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and this only in certain circles. The theologians and people of many churches still use phrases like “the life of Christ,” because “Christ” is primarily a name. It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise when the Old Testament implications of the title have become a secondary consideration in its use a process already evident within the New Testament.
“Jesus Before the Gates of Jerusalem,” manuscript illumination by Liberale da Verona, 1470-74; in the Piccolomini Library, Siena, Italy
God’s only Son
The declaration that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is one of the most universal in the New Testament, in which most of the books refer to him that way. The Gospels do not quote him as using the title for himself in so many words, although sayings like verse 27 of the 11th chapter of Matthew come close to it. There are some instances where the usage of the Gospels appears to echo the more-general implications of divine sonship in the Old Testament as a prerogative of Israel or of the true believer. Usually, however, it is evident that the Evangelists, like Paul, meant some special honour by the name. The Evangelists associated the honour with the story of Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:17) and Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5), Paul with the faith in the Resurrection (Romans 1:4). From that association some have argued that “Son of God” in the New Testament never referred to the preexistence of Christ. But it is clear in John and in Paul that this implication was not absent, even though it was not as prominent as it became soon thereafter. What made the implication of preexistence more prominent in later Christian use of the term Son of God was the clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, where Son was the name for the eternal Second Person (Matthew 28:19). As the Gospels show, the application of the name Son of God to Jesus was offensive to the Jews, probably because it seemed to smack of Gentile polytheism. That also made it all too intelligible to the pagans, as early heresies indicate. Facing both the Jews and the Greeks, the apostolic church confessed that Jesus Christ was “God’s only Son”: the Son of God, in antithesis to Jewish claims that the eternal could have no sons; the only Son, in antithesis to Greek myths of divine procreation.
The Trinity represented by Christ as a man, the Holy Spirit as a dove, and God as a hand; Armenian miniature of the baptism of Jesus, 1273; in the Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.
The Lord
As passages like the fourth verse of the first chapter of Romans show, the phrase “Jesus Christ our Lord” was one of the ways the apostolic church expressed its understanding of what he had been and done. Luke even put the title into the mouth of the Christmas angel (Luke 2:11). From the way the name “Lord” (Kyrios) was employed during the 1st century, it is possible to see several implications in the Christian use of it for Christ. The Christians meant that there were not many divine and lordly beings in the universe but only one Kyrios (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). They meant that the Roman Caesar was not the lord of all, as he was styled by his worshippers, but that only Christ was Lord (Revelation 17:14). And they meant that Yahweh, the covenant God of the Old Testament, whose name they pronounced as “Lord,” had come in Jesus Christ to establish the new covenant (Romans 10:12–13). Like “Son of God,” therefore, the name Kyrios was directed against both parts of the audience to which the primitive church addressed its proclamation. At times it stood particularly for the risen and glorified Christ (e.g., Acts 2:36), but in passages that echoed the Old Testament it was sometimes the preexistence that was being primarily emphasized (Matthew 22:44). Gradually, “our Lord,” like “Christ,” became a common way of speaking about Jesus Christ, even when the speaker did not intend to stress his lordship over the world.
Incarnation and humiliation
Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary
Earlier forms of the creed seem to have read: “Born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.” The primary affirmation of this article is that the Son of God, the Word, had become human or, as John’s Gospel put it, “flesh” (John 1:14). Preexistence and Incarnation presuppose each other in the Christian view of Jesus Christ. Hence, the New Testament assumed his preexistence when it talked about his becoming human, and, when it spoke of him as preexistent, it was ascribing that preexistence to him whom it was describing in the flesh. It may be that the reference to Mary in the creed was intended to stress primarily her function as the guarantee of Christ’s true humanity, but the creed also intended to teach the supernatural origin of that humanity. Although it is true that neither Paul nor John makes reference to it, the teaching about the virginal conception of Jesus, apparently based upon verse 14 of the seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah, was sufficiently widespread in the 1st century to warrant inclusion in both Matthew and Luke as well as in creeds that date back to the 1st century. As it stands, the creedal statement is a paraphrase of verse 35 of the first chapter of Luke. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit was also involved in the baptism and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried
To a reader of the Gospels, the most-striking feature of the creed is probably its omission of that which occupied a major part of the Gospels, the story of Jesus’ life and teachings. In this respect there is a direct parallel between the creed and the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul. Judging by the amount of space they devoted to the Passion story, even the writers of the Gospels were apparently more interested in those few days of Jesus’ life than they were in anything else he had said or done. The reason for that was the faith underlying both the New Testament and the creed, that the events of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection were the events by which God had accomplished the salvation of human beings. The Gospels found their climax in those events, and the other material in them led up to those events. The Epistles applied those events to concrete situations in the early church.
The Crucifixion, painting by Andrea Mantegna, 1456–59; in the Louvre, Paris
Giraudon—Art Resource/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
From the way Paul could speak of the Cross (Philemon 2:6–11) and of “the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23), it seems that before the Gospels came into existence the church commemorated the happenings associated with what came to be called Holy Week. Some of the earliest Christian art was a portrayal of those happenings, another indication of their importance in the cultic and devotional life of early Christianity. How did the Cross effect the salvation of human beings? The answers of the New Testament and the early church to this question involved a variety of metaphors: Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to God; his life was a ransom for many; his death made humankind alive; his suffering was an example to people when they must suffer; he was the Second Adam, creating a new humanity; his death shows people how much God loves them; and others. Every major Atonement theory of Christian theological history discussed below was anticipated by one or another of these metaphors. The New Testament employed them all to symbolize something that could be described only symbolically, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
He descended into hell
The phrase about the descent into hell was probably the last to be added to the creed. Its principal source in the New Testament was the description in the third chapter of the First Letter of Peter (verses 18–20) of Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison. Originally, the descent into hell may have been identified with the death of Christ, when he entered the abode of the dead in the underworld. But in the time before it entered the creed, the descent was frequently taken to mean that Christ had gone to rescue the souls of the Old Testament faithful from the underworld, from what Western Catholic theology eventually called the limbo patrum. Among some of the Church Fathers the descent into hell had come to mean Christ’s declaration of his triumph over the powers of hell. Despite its subsequent growth in importance, however, the doctrine of the descent into hell apparently did not form an integralpart of the apostolic preaching about Christ.
Glorification
The third day he rose again from the dead
The writers of the New Testament nowhere made the Resurrection of Christ a matter for argument but everywhere asserted it and assumed it. With it began that state in the history of Jesus Christ that was still continuing, his elevation to glory. They used it as a basis for three kinds of affirmations. The Resurrection of Christ was the way God bore witness to his son, “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4); this theme was also prominent in the Acts of the Apostles. The Resurrection was the basis for the Christian hope for life after death (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Paul wrote that without it that hope was said to be baseless (1 Corinthians 15:12–20). The Resurrection of Christ was also the ground for admonitions to manifest a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) and to “seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). The writers of the New Testament themselves expressed no doubt that the Resurrection had really happened. But Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians shows that among those who heard the Christian message there was such doubt as well as efforts to rationalize the Resurrection. The differences among the Gospels, and between the Gospels and Paul, suggest that from the outset a variety of traditions existed regarding the details of the Resurrection. But such differences only serve to emphasize how universal the faith in the Resurrection was amid this variety of traditions.
He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty
As indicated earlier, the narrative of the Ascension is peculiar to Luke-Acts, but other parts of the New Testament may refer to it. Such a reference may be made in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians (verses 8–10). However, many interpreters hold that, for Paul, Resurrection was identical with Ascension. That, they maintain, is why he could speak of the appearance of the risen Christ to him in continuity with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) despite the fact that, in the chronology of the creed, the Ascension intervened between them. Session at the right hand of the Father was apparently a Christian interpretation of the first verse of Psalm 110. It implied the elevation—or, as the doctrine of preexistence became clearer, the restoration—of Christ to a position of honour with God. Taken together, the Ascension and the session were a way of speaking about the presence of Christ with the Father during the interim between the Resurrection and the Second Advent. From the Ephesians passage it is evident that this way of speaking was by no means inconsistent with another Christian tenet, the belief that Christ was still present in and with his church. It was, in fact, the only way to state that tenet in harmony with the doctrine of the Resurrection.
From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead
The creed concludes its Christological section with the doctrine of the Second Advent: the First Advent was a coming into the flesh, the Second Advent a coming in glory. Much controversy among modern scholars has been occasioned by the role of this doctrine in the early church. Those who maintain that Jesus erroneously expected the early end of the world have often interpreted Paul as the first of those who began the adjustment to a delay in the end, with John’s Gospel as a more-advanced stage of that adjustment. Those who hold that the imminence of the end was a continuing aspect of human history as Jesus saw it also maintain that this phrase of the creed was a statement of that imminence, without any timetable necessarily implied. From the New Testament it seems that both the hope of the Second Coming and a faith in the continuing presence of Christ belonged to the outlook of the apostolic church, and that seems to be what the creed meant. The phrase “the living and the dead” is a summary of passages on the Second Coming from several of Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians (15:51–52) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15–17).
In order to complete the confession of the creed regarding the glorification of Christ, the Nicene Creed added the phrase “of His kingdom there shall be no end.” That was a declaration that Christ’s return as judge would usher in the full exercise of his reign over the world. Such was the expectation of the apostolic church, based upon what it knew and believed about Jesus Christ.
About john john