Credo: A 12-part series on the creed
Editor's note: This article is the second of 12 in a new series on the Creed by Deacon Matthew Newsome. Explore the series.
Last month we began our 12-part exploration of the Apostles’ Creed by examining the first article: “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” This month we take a look at the second article of the Creed, expressing our faith in “Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”
Different aspects of Christ’s life and ministry are treated in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh articles, but this month our particular focus will be on the Person of Jesus. The second article of the Creed is short, but relates three important facts: Jesus is the Christ, He is God’s Son, and He is Lord.
Belief in God is foundational to our faith. To be any kind of person of faith is to acknowledge that there is a God, and we’re not Him. What makes Christians unique is our faith in Christ. The most fundamental doctrines that all Christians must acknowledge to be worthy of the name are the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity: that is, that the one God exists as three Persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and that God the Son took on human nature and became man. Both of these essential doctrines are revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
The Word made flesh
When the Second Person became incarnate (which we will discuss more next month), the name given to Him by the angel was “Jesus” (Lk 1:31). In and of itself, this may not appear significant. “Jesus” was among the most common Jewish male names at the time.
We might have thought Gabriel would have instructed Mary to name her son “Emmanuel” after the prophecy in Isaiah (Is 7:14, cf. Mt 1:23), which means “God-with-us.” As the Word made flesh, Jesus is indeed God-with-us, but His proper name is “Yeshua.”
This Hebrew name means “God saves” (CCC 430) and to the people of Israel it served as a reminder of the fact that they should look to no one but God for their salvation. Only God is their stronghold and their savior (Ps 62:6).
The same name can be rendered in English as “Joshua.” It is the name borne by the successor of Moses who led Israel into the Promised Land. By bearing the same name, the Word incarnate is telling us that He is the ultimate successor of Moses. He is the prophet Moses foretold God would raise up to guide His people (Deut 18:15). He is the answer to the petition, the expectation and the hope of every Jewish parent who named their son “Yeshua.” He is God’s salvation come into the world.
Priest, Prophet and King
If the name “Jesus” was given by the angel Gabriel, where does the name “Christ” come from?
The Greek “Christos” is a translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah,” meaning “anointed one.” To be anointed was a sign not only of God’s favor, but of a special mission. Saul and
David were anointed as kings of Israel. Aaron was anointed as a priest. Elijah received an anointing as God’s prophet. All of these figures are messiahs, or anointed ones. But from ancient times Israel had an expectation of a final and definitive Messiah who would be their liberator. Some looked for multiple Messianic figures to fulfill the various roles of priest, prophet and king. Jesus fulfills all three (CCC 436).
When Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit at His baptism, the Father’s voice was heard proclaiming, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17). Sons share the same nature as their fathers. Human parents beget human children, not dogs or chickens. Mother cats give birth to kittens, not chipmunks. While all human beings can claim to be God’s children in a metaphorical sense, because we have God as our maker, Christians have the grace of being God’s adopted children as members of the Body of Christ. But Christ alone can claim to be the Son of God by nature. Thus we profess in the Nicene Creed that He is “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”
Christ is Lord
God’s nature is expressed in the name He revealed to Moses, YHWH (Ex 3:14), “I AM.” God’s nature is existence itself – that means to share in God’s nature is to share His being. Thus, as God’s Son, Jesus can truly say, “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30) and “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9).
This makes Jesus more than any human priest, prophet or king. He is not merely one favored by God. He is God incarnate, and so is rightly called Lord or “Kyrios” in Greek. The Catechism teaches, “By attributing to Jesus the divine title ‘Lord,’ the first confessions of the Church’s faith affirm from the beginning that the power, honor, and glory due to God the Father are due also to Jesus” (CCC 449). His divinity is demonstrated in a most profound way by the Resurrection, after which the Apostle Thomas acclaims Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).
The union of human and divine nature in the Person of Jesus Christ has implications we will continue to unpack over the course of the coming months.
Affirming our faith in Jesus as Lord and God is something we can and should do every day, as expressed most beautifully in the traditional prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This simple prayer, modeled after the publican’s prayer in Luke 18:13, expresses perfectly three essential truths: who we are (sinners), who Jesus is (God), and what we need from Him (mercy).
Deacon Matthew Newsome is the Catholic campus minister at Western Carolina University. He is the author of “The Devout Life: A Modern Guide to Practical Holiness with St. Francis de Sales,” available now from Sophia Institute Press.
Credo: A 12-part series on the creed
Editor's note: This article is the first of 12 in a new series on the Creed by Deacon Matthew Newsome.Explore the series.
We often speak of “the” creed but the Church in fact employs multiple creeds. The two most familiar are the Nicene Creed, which we profess during the Mass on Sundays, and the Apostles’ Creed, which we recite at the beginning of the rosary. These credal statements have different historical origins, though they profess the same truths.
The Nicene Creed was formulated during the Councils of Nicea (325 A.D.) and Constantinople (381 A.D.) in response to certain heresies, but the origins of the Apostles’
Creed are more obscure. While there is no evidence that it was composed by the Apostles, as is sometimes claimed, the Catechism says it is “the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome” and calls it “a faithful summary of the apostles’ faith” (CCC 194).
Perhaps because of its association with the Apostles, it is often divided into twelve articles. There are conveniently 12 months in a year, so to help our readers have a better understanding of the faith we profess, over the course of this year I will be offering monthly expositions on the Apostles’ Creed, beginning this month with the statement, “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”
The first word of the Creed is "Credo" in Latin or “I believe” in English. This single word gets to the heart of what a creed is: It is a capsule statement of belief useful both as a teaching tool and as a measure of doctrinal union. As the Catechism puts it, “Communion in faith needs a common language of faith, normative for all and uniting all in the same confession of faith” (CCC 185).
A creed, like Dr. Who’s TARDIS, can be described as something “bigger on the inside.” In itself it is small and memorizable, easily fitting on a prayer card. But the truths it expresses are so vast and deep that many volumes could not exhaust its contents.
'I believe'
Let us begin by exploring the words “I believe.”
What does it mean to believe in something? The word “belief” today often indicates a degree of uncertainty. For example, “I believe I may have left the oven on this morning” is not as firm a statement as “I know I left the oven on.” Yet when we use the word “believe” in the context of our faith, we mean something certain – something we would stake our lives on, as the martyrs attest.
These days faith is often presumed to be a less reliable means of knowing than scientific knowledge. The scientific method is a wonderful way of attaining empirical knowledge about the material world. But in fact, most of the knowledge we possess (not only religious truths) is acquired through faith. I believe that this pill will make me better because I have faith in the doctor who prescribed it. I believe that the sun will rise this morning because it has so far risen every day of my life and I trust my own lived experience. Science offers explanations for why these things work as they do, but unless I run the experiments myself and analyze the data, my knowledge rests on the faith I have in the authorities who teach me.
The object of our faith
Faith involves trust in authority, bolstered by reason and affirmed by experience. The greater the authority, the greater trust it warrants. The authority of the Church was given to her by Jesus Christ, attested to by the martyrs, and affirmed over centuries of practice.
This brings us to the object of our faith, God the Father almighty.
By “God,” we don’t mean to refer to one god among many, as the Greeks believed in Zeus, Hera and Poseidon. Atheists often seek to minimalize their unbelief by claiming, “I only believe in one less god than you.” But the Christian God is not a preferred favorite of a pantheon. Sometimes the Egyptian pharaoh Ahkenaten is credited as an early monotheist because during his reign he only permitted worship of the sun-god Aten. This was not true monotheism, but merely a restriction of the cultic worship of the many gods believed in by the ancient Egyptians. The existence of the other gods was still acknowledged, though their cults were suppressed. By contrast, the revealed religion of Israel is truly monotheistic. “The Lord our God is God alone” (Dt 6:4) and “Who is God except the Lord?” (Ps 18:31).
No other gods besides Him
We do not worship the god “of the sun” or “of the sea” or “of the harvest.” Our God is the creator of “heaven and earth” – a Hebrew idiom meaning “all above and below,” referring to everything that is. The origin stories of pagan religions typically begin by describing how their gods came to be. Our origin story begins, “In the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1). God is a presupposed reality. Everything else comes from Him. In stating that God makes the sun and the moon, the sea and the land, the author of Genesis is asserting that all the things pagans worship as gods are in fact creations made by the one true God.
“The confession of God’s oneness,” the Catechism says, “which has its roots in the divine revelation of the Old Covenant, is inseparable from the profession of God’s existence and is equally fundamental” (CCC 200). “God is unique. There are no other gods besides Him” (CCC 212). This God revealed His divine name to Moses from the burning bush as YHWH, or “I Am Who Am” (Ex 3:14). God simply IS. He alone is the uncreated fullness of being without beginning or end, and the source of all else that exists. He is the Mind, the Power, the Love, and the Meaning that undergirds the entire universe.
And the most beautiful and incredible part of this opening credal statement we profess is that, as creatures made in God’s image (Gn 1:27) and adopted through His Son (Eph 1:5, Rom 8:17), we have the unmerited privilege of knowing the ineffable Creator not only as our God, but our “Father.”
— Deacon Matthew Newsome is the Catholic campus minister at Western Carolina University. He is the author of “The Devout Life: A Modern Guide to Practical Holiness with St. Francis de Sales,” available now from Sophia Institute Press.