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RCIA READINGS ON: The Creed, Church, Gnostics, Errors
RCIA Holy Eucharist St Albans South
TOPIC: THE CREED
Reading Topic:
IN WHAT SENSE DO WE “BELIEVE IN” THE CHURCH?
(Excerpts from: The Church We Believe In: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic by Francis A. Sullivan SJ; pp.5-7)
IN the English translation of the creed with which Catholics profess their faith during Sunday mass,
after saying: “We believe in one God the Father”… “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ”… “We
believe in the Holy Spirit” … we also say: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” This
translation does: not bring out the difference between “believing in” God and “believing in” the
church: a difference in which the official Latin version of the creed expresses by using the term:
“believe in” only with reference to the Divine Persons. The Latin text does not say, as the English
does “We believe in the church.”
Since we do not follow the Latin in its restriction of the term “believe in” to refer to belief in God, it
is all the more important for to understand the difference between “believing in” God and “believing
in” something other than God. When we say we believe in God, what we mean is that we put our
faith in God: we commit ourselves to God as the ground of our very being, as the ultimate motive of
our faith, as the one in whom we place our trust, in whom we put our hope for salvation and eternal
life. It is not a question of merely believing that God exists, or believing certain things about him. It is
a question of a commitment that we make ourselves to him, in faith, hope and trust. We cannot
make such an act of faith in any creature; we cannot “believe in” any created reality in the same
unique way in which we believe in God.
In what sense, then, do we “believe in” in the church? To answer this question, let us look at the
creed again. When we have said: “We believe in God the Father,” we go to profess our belief in what
he has revealed to us about his work of creation; when we have said “We believe in one Lord Jesus
Christ” we go on to express our belief in his incarnation, death, resurrection and future coming in
glory; when we have said “We believe in the Holy Spirit” we go on to express our belief in the
Church, baptism, resurrection of the dead, life everlasting. The difference, with regard to our faith, is
between God himself and the created works of God has accomplished and revealed to us. It is the
very nature of these works of God on our behalf, that even after they have been revealed, they still
far surpass our capacity fully to grasp or understand them. While they are not identical with god,
they are so associated with him who is the ultimate mystery that, even when revealed to us, they
must remain, at least in this life, objects of faith rather than of complete understanding. As we have
said above, theology is defined as “faith that seeks understanding”; but sine the object of faith is
“mystery,” the understanding that theology can reach will always fall short of a total grasp of the
reality.
What that means, then, is that when in the creed we say “We believe in the church,” we are
acknowledging the fact that the church, like the incarnation of the Son of God and his death and
resurrection for our redemption, is a “mystery of our faith”: a element in the whole “economy of
salvation” which God has accomplished and revealed to us. We are accepting the church as part of
the total object of our Christian faith. We are professing our faith that the church is not a purely
human institution, but is a work of God, a part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world.
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RCIA READINGS ON: The Creed, Church, Gnostics, Errors
This follows, in the first place, from the very fact of the inclusion of the church among those things
about which Christians profess their faith in the creed. It is surely significant that we find mention of
the church in the baptismal creed that was in use in Rome around the end of the second century. It
would be useful to recall here what we know about the development of the early Christian creeds.
The formulation of the “creeds” had its origin in the practice of requiring that converts should make
a profession of Christian faith as they were baptized. In the early church, baptism was a real bath, in
which the candidate was totally immersed three times in the baptismal pool. Prior to each
immersion, the candidate was asked to profess his faith: the first timer in God the Father, the second
time in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the third time in the Holy Spirit. The earliest baptismal creeds that
have come down to us are in the form of three questions, to which the candidate would reply: “I do
believe.” (We still use this form of profession of faith when we renew our baptismal vows at the
Easter Vigil.) It seems almost certain that in the most primitive form, the third question would have
been simply: “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” But we know, from the Apostolic Tradition of
Hippolytus, written about the year 215, that by the end of the second century, the third question
asked of the one being baptized in the church of Rome was: “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit in the
holy church?”
From the third century on, every baptismal creed that has come down to us, whether in the earlier
question-and-answer form, or in the later declaratory form (such as we have in the so-called
Apostles’ Creed, which is still our baptismal creed), mentions the “holy church” after the Holy Spirit.
Actually, the church never appears in a baptismal creed without the adjective “holy”; the Apostles’
Creed adds “catholic,” and, as we have already seen, it was the creed of the Council of
Constantinople in 381 that definitively settled on the four attributes that were already being
mentioned in the baptismal creeds of some Eastern Christian churches.
If one asks what prompted the second century church to begin to require the candidates for baptism
profess their faith in the “holy church,” the most likely answer is the one suggested by J.N. D. Kelly, a
foremost authority on the history of the creeds. He suggested that it was because about this time, as
we know from the writings of St Irenaeus, the gnostic heretics, who posed the most serious threat to
the true faith, despised the people who belonged to the churches over which the bishops presided.
The gnostics prided themselves on having a higher, more perfect knowledge of revelation than was
being taught by the bishops, so they gathered in their own private meetings, despising the Christian
churches and their leaders. Against the gnostics, St Irenaeus insisted that it was only in the holy
church that the Holy Spirit could be found and his gifts received. In this atmosphere it is
understandable why those seeking baptism should be asked to profess their faith “in the Holy Spirit
in the holy church.”