Who is the "I" Who Believes the Creed?

Why we don't need to fully understand the creed to confess the creed

This is part 2 of a series on the Apostles’ Creed through the lens of Ben Myers’ book The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism.

Do “I” believe?

Myers has a chapter on the very first word of the Apostles’ Creed: “I.” In the Nicene Creed we confess that “we” believe, but the Apostles’ Creed uses the first person singular pronoun.

Myers reflects on the overly-individualistic nature of our modern age, which is (sometimes rightfully) suspicious of the past. “We are skeptical about anything that is merely handed down to us. We assume that the truest thing we could ever say would be something had made up ourselves.”

I’ve had conversations with people in our church who struggle to confess the creed, because they’re unsure if they, as an individual, really do “believe” all the articles of the creed. Am I really 100% certain about the virgin birth? Do I understand what I mean when I say that Jesus “descended to the dead”?

Immersed in a reality beyond ourselves

These are questions worth dwelling on, but confessing the creed isn’t really about being personally 100% certain about the facts. It’s more about belonging to a story. It’s about being part of the great cloud of witnesses who belong to Christ and participate in the life of God.

Who is the “I” that believes in the creed? The whole body of Christ, not just the individual members of it. I love how Myers clarifies this:

“I believe.” Who is the “I” that speaks when we make that confession? It is the body of Christ. It is a community stretched out across history… In baptism nobody is invited to come up with their own personal statement of belief. All are invited to be immersed into a reality beyond themselves and to join their individual voices to a communal voice that transcends them all.

We don’t need to know what we mean

Because of this, we don’t need to be 100% certain we know what it means that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, or descended to the dead, or ascended into heaven. Confessing the creed is not about reciting facts that I personally, rationally, fully understand. It’s about taking our place in the body of Christ, trusting that the Church “knows” what this means, and we are part of her, so perhaps we “know” in a way that runs deeper than our ability as an individual to explain.

In some ways, it’s the same kind of thing as talking about God at all. For example, the basic Christian claim about God is that there is one God, who has been revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But we don’t actually know what we mean by that, when you think about it. And that’s actually okay. I love how Herbert McCabe puts it:

Dealing with God is trying to talk of what we cannot talk of, trying to think of what we cannot think… To say that there is Father, Son and Holy Spirit who are God is no more mysterious than to say there is God at all. In neither case do we know what we are saying, but in neither case are we talking nonsense by contradicting ourselves.

Confessing the creed is the same kind of thing. We don’t need to fully comprehend the meaning of everything we confess, because it’s something we have received, and something we are part of, a community we belong to. And so we trust it is good and formative to confess this truth that has been given to us, even if we’re not sure what it means.

Next in this series: What it Means to "Believe" in God