The Creed we sing every Sunday is not simply another hymn in the Liturgy. It is more than that: it is a door. That door leads back through our Church’s exciting and tumultuous history to a time of heresy and danger, a time of councils and counter-councils, of great battles fought long and hard to preserve timeless truth. The result of all that warfare is our present Creed—a confession stained with the tears and the blood of saints, and given to the Church ever after as a saving standard and a glorious banner.
In this series of essays, Fr. Lawrence Farley, author of numerous books on topics ranging from Scripture to the Liturgy, introduces readers to the history and meaning of the Creed—and, by extension, the fundamental teachings of Orthodox Christianity.
The confession of faith which we Orthodox chant or sing every Sunday at our Divine Liturgy has a long and complicated history, and examining its history plunges us back into the earliest days of the Church’s life. It is a glorious plunge. Discipleship to Jesus and inclusion in His Church Read more…
The Church had always confessed the divinity of Christ. The New Testament had proclaimed Jesus as the divine Son of God, and the phrase “Christ our God” had been used since the days of St. Ignatius of Antioch (in his Epistle to the Romans), who died about 107 A.D. The Read more…
To us today, it sounds a little odd to begin a creed with anything so obvious as the fact that there exists but one God, and that this almighty Father is the creator of heaven and earth. Given that the rest of the creed is devoted to proclaiming the Church’s Read more…
The Creed not only confesses that our God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the creator of heaven and earth. It also adds the phrase that He is the creator “of all things, visible and invisible.” In its original form, the phrase was probably added to hammer yet Read more…
As mentioned in a previous article on the history of the Nicene Creed, a controversy erupted in the church of the fourth century through the teachings of Arius. Though granting that Jesus existed before His birth at Bethlehem as the Word of the Father, Arius denied that this Word was Read more…
In our present version of the Creed, after a bold assertion of Christ’s full divinity comes a recitation of His mighty acts. “For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became Man, and was Read more…
The third main section of the present Creed concerns the Holy Spirit and His work in the holy Church. We note that the Holy Spirit and the Church are paired together in the Creed, for the Church is the handiwork and home of the Holy Spirit, and one cannot think Read more…
As mentioned before, the third main section of the present Creed concerns the Holy Spirit and His work in the holy Church, and we note that the Holy Spirit and the Church are paired together. Here we examine the creedal description of the Church. The mention of the Church in Read more…
We saw previously that the Creed confesses the Church as an object of faith to show how, despite all its historical liturgical diversity (especially in the pre-Nicene period), the true Church was one, and the salvation one experienced there was not affected by where one lived. We look now at the Read more…
Another part of the third main section of the present Creed focusing upon the Holy Spirit and His work in the holy Church concerns holy baptism. The phrase runs, “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.” Here we note in passing a change of verb, with the accompanying Read more…
The last part of the third main section of the present Creed says, “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.” Though this part of the Creed was not included with an eye to refuting the heresies of the fourth century, the Read more…
In our modern Orthodox Liturgy, the Creed is prefaced by a diaconal word of command. That is, just before the Creed is chanted or sung, the deacon cries out, “The doors! The doors!” and only after this does he invite the faithful to join in reciting the Creed by saying, Read more…