Read an Excerpt from “Easter According to the Apostles’ Creed”
If you have ever attended a Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian church, you may have heard something similar to the words which are referred to as the Apostles’ Creed. Now, Baptists (I am an ordained minister in the Baptist denomination), as a rule, do not subscribe to any creed. Coming out of the Protestant Reformation, Baptists decided that, unlike other Protestant denominations, they would be non-creedal. Baptists state that “the final authority for faith and practice is the Bible, not words about the Bible.” However, while I do not hold any creed to the level of inspired Scripture, I believe that there are some elements from other parts of the church that are good that we should at least be aware of and that we can learn from.
The Apostles’ Creed is one of those things.
What is a creed? According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a creed is a “statement of basic beliefs; an idea or set of beliefs that guides the actions of a person or group.” Thus, the Apostles’ Creed is a statement of what the apostles of Jesus Christ believed.
The earliest written version of the Apostles’ Creed is known as the “old Roman creed” (or “old Roman symbol”). According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, it was put in written form by 180 AD. Tradition states that, on the day of Pentecost, the twelve Apostles each contributed one line to this creed to make up the twelve lines of the “old Roman creed” that we have today. It goes as follows:
I believe in God the Father almighty;
and in Christ Jesus His only Son, our Lord,
Who was born from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried,
on the third day rose again from the dead,
ascended to heaven,
sits at the right hand of the Father,
whence He will come to judge the living and the dead;
and in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Church,
the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the flesh
(the life everlasting)
