What it Means to "Believe" in God
How trust precedes understanding and makes life possible
This is part 3 of a series on the Apostles’ Creed through the lens of Ben Myers’ book The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism. And for fun, I’ve also started reading Brother David Steindl-Rast’s book Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles’ Creed as I go through this series.
We’ve talked about how creeds are sacramental (not just educational), and who the “I” is that believes the Apostles’ Creed. Now we move on to think about what it means to “believe” when we confess the Creed. (I promise we won’t go one word at a time through the whole creed.)
The word “creed” comes from the Latin credo, which simply means “I believe,” which is, of course, how the Apostles’ Creed starts, and the structure on which it is built. But what does it actually mean to “believe” in God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit? Does it mean that we mentally assent to this list of facts about God? Are we declaring that we find every statement in the creed intellectually plausible?
Belief is about trust
You can probably guess that it’s a lot more than that. Stendl-Rast says that “I believe” means that “I dedicate myself in complete trust to a power greater than myself,” and points out that the Latin word credo is a compound of cor (“heart”) and do (“I give”) and thus literally means “I give my heart.” To confess “I believe” is to give one’s heart in trust to the Triune God revealed in the creed, not just an agreement with the facts stated in the creed.
Myers brings Augustine into view here, who pointed out at the end of the fourth century that life would simply be impossible without trust. We have no way of independently verifying anything that happened in the past, for example, without trusting the people who are telling us what happened.
And this is a good thing, actually. What a shriveled existence it would be if we didn’t trust the people in our lives to tell us the truth and respect our humanity. Of course, we all act in untrustworthy ways from time to time, which makes this a difficult and daunting prospect, but the fact remains that we simply cannot live without trust. The creed extends that trust to God in an explicit way.
Trusting precedes knowing
So can we know if God is trustworthy? Yes we can. But we gain this assurance over time as we take the “risk” of trusting God in concrete ways. “God’s trustworthiness is verified by experience,” Myers writes (chanelling Augustine), “But we don’t start with verification. We start with trust: this leads to experience: and experience leads to knowledge of God’s trustworthiness.”
Athanasius said much the same thing earlier in the fourth century. In part 28 of his classic work On the Incarnation, Athanasius is speaking to those who may still doubt that death has been defeated in the resurrection of Jesus. Even after seeing so many martyrs go willingly to death, he says,
If, regardless, he still has doubt in his mind that death has been destroyed and brought to an end… let the one not believing the victory over death accept the faith of Christ and come over to his teaching, and he will see the weakness of death and the victory over it.
Athanasius is saying. “Don’t believe me about death being defeated? Become a Christian and you’ll see it’s true!” Which is kind of funny. But he’s not being flippant. Rather, he understands that, while the death of death really is an objective fact, you can really only perceive it with the eyes of faith. It’s not the kind of thing that’s scientifically verifiable by disinterested, academic observation. It’s a reality we enter into when we take a step of embodied trust in Jesus.
One of the axioms in my book Having the Mind of Christ is that God transforms us not through detached analysis but through embodied participation. In other words, we can never truly see a spiritual truth by examining it from a safe distance. We can’t understand the kingdom of God by moving away from it and analyzing it. We only really see and understand spiritual things from the inside, as we participate in them.
Trying on the glasses of faith
It’s kind of like trying on a new pair of glasses. You can’t really know if they work by looking at them and analyzing them from a distance. You have to put them on your face and participate in the way they bend the light, and see how your eyes respond to it. Only after trying the glasses on do you know whether or not they are helpful to you. (And often it takes a few days or weeks to acclimate to a new prescription, but the only way to acclimate is to keep wearning the glasses.)
In other words, you can only really see from the “inside.” We begin to discover and understand the mysteries the creed only after we start the journey of trusting the Triune God the creed reveals. And that not some kind of game God is playing with us, it’s just the nature of the Truth we seek to know. It cannot be verified “ahead of time.”
So to say “I believe” in church or in prayer is not necessarily an act of triumphalistic certainty, but rather a prayer for our faith to increase. You don’t need to feel certain about eevery article in the creed to confess it. (In fact it might be better if you didn’t feel certain, because your certainty is almost certainly misplaced!) In other words, every time we confess “I believe,” we are also praying “Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).