Preface

Chapter 1
Continuity and Change in Creeds and Confessions

Chapter 2
The Creedal and Confessional Imperative

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Preface

Credo is intended to serve two distinct but not, I trust, incompatible purposes, as is evident even from its design and appearance. In its format and binding it is identical with the volumes of texts making up Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, edited by Valerie R. Hotchkiss and myself, for which it is intended to be a general historical introduction, making it possible for those volumes to economize on space by limiting themselves in their headnotes to the specific historical material needed for each document. At the same time, Credo is not numbered consecutively with those volumes, because it is also intended to be a free-standing monograph and reference work in its own right, even a textbook, also for readers who do not have the volumes of the set. For that reason, references to creeds and confessions are by article and section rather than by volume and page in our edition, so that those who have access to other editions, printed or electronic, in the original or in a translation, can easily find their way around. In the Abbreviations for Creeds and Confessions in the front matter of this volume, therefore, the locations of the texts are indicated first by the volume and pages for our edition, and, if possible, by the volume and pages of some other edition, in the original language or in translation. Although it seemed appropriate in the several parts of Creeds and Confessions of Faith to employ varying formats for the titles of creeds and confessions—in Part Five, for example, where the confessions come from the era defined by denominationalism, the name of the sponsoring church appears first, then the title of the confession and the date--I have, for the sake of consistency, made the format as uniform as possible here in Credo, both in the body of the book and in the Abbreviations at the front. Because neither the thousands of pages of the printed version of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition nor its CD-ROM supplement can come close to including all the existing texts, I have felt free in this companion volume to draw some citations and quotations also from creeds and confessions that we have not been able to reproduce in the set; in such a case, the passage can be located in an edition that are listed for that text in the front matter under Editions, Collections, and Reference Works.

On a more personal note: I am continuing in this work the lifelong scholarly research into the history of confessions that began with my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago in 1946 on The [First] Bohemian Confession of 1535 and that has continued since then with several publications on other creeds and confessions. I should also add that both this companion volume Credo (especially its last five chapters) and the five parts of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition have been a natural progression from the five volumes of my magnum opus, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, which the University of Chicago Press published between 1971 and 1989; the subjects of the five chapters and of the five parts correspond to those of the five volumes. To avoid repetition, especially of its massive documentation of primary sources and its extensive bibliographies of secondary works, I have felt free here to make continuing cross-references to it. Because that work cut across the historical periods by which scholars of Christian history usually identify themselves, and because it was able to do so only by narrowing its line of vision from the entire history of Christianity to "what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God," as its opening sentence defined, the decades of research in the primary sources on which it was based had necessarily brought me into close contact with most (though not quite all) of the creeds and confessions of faith that are now collected in the volumes of Creeds and Confessions of Faith, where the emphasis is primarily on the creeds and confessions as such rather than, as it was in The Christian Tradition, on their doctrines. My definition of the territory I intended to explore in my history of doctrine had been based on a cartography that prompted many colleagues and students during the years of its composition to urge that I was uniquely positioned to undertake next a new collection that would replace Philip Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, which first appeared in 1877 and has been in continual use ever since.

As a rule, biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV), which is therefore not usually identified. Sometimes they are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV); and occasionally (for example, to retain the distinction, lost in modern English, between the second person singular pronouns "thou/thee," even as applied to human persons, and the second person plural personal pronouns "ye/you"), they are from the Authorized ("King James") Version (AV). For the sake of consistency and comparability in the numbering of the Book of Psalms, in which the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate deviate from the Hebrew and therefore from the translations that followed the Hebrew, the Hebrew system of numbering has been employed throughout. But for biblical quotations that are cited from creeds and confessions, the version of the Bible quoted here is the version quoted there, or the translation into some other language there has in turn been translated into English here, regardless of whether that translation agrees with the original Hebrew or Greek of the biblical passage. Also for the sake of consistency, the spelling of proper names here in Credo as well as throughout Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition has been conformed to that of the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), with a few minor exceptions such as the Council of Basel (not "Basle") and The Smalcald Articles (not "Schmalkaldic").

To be as fair as possible in a field where the virtue of fairness is often very difficult to achieve (and sometimes rather hard to find), I have striven in the nomenclature of Christian communions, confessions, and churches to identify them as they identify themselves, and yet to be reader-friendly. A significant part of the problem lies, to put it typographically, in capitalization. Every Christian creed or confession claims to be orthodox, after its fashion; every Christian church wants to define itself as catholic, evangelical, and reformed, at least in some sense; every Christian believer strives to be a disciple of Christ, howsoever "the cost of discipleship" may be understood. But when these terms are capitalized, they become denominational and confessional labels and are most often used by their adherents without a qualifying term. In the present context, however, such qualifying compounds as Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox have often seemed to be necessary. The nomenclature for Anglicanism presents special complications in a book about creeds and confessions: whatever may be the right way to speak about Anglican polity or Anglican liturgy, the Anglican confession, which was during the Reformation and technically still is The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, is a Protestant confession that belongs to the Reformed family of confessions. I have reflected that ambivalence by sometimes distinguishing "Anglican" from "Protestant" and sometimes ignoring the distinction.

In a work that spans so many centuries and so many cultures, I have drawn on works written in many languages, as I have listed them in the Bibliography and in "Editions, Collections, and Reference Works." But as much as possible, I cite these other sources, too, secondary as well as primary, in available English translations, on the assumption that scholars who are able to handle the original language can readily locate a passage on the basis of such a reference whereas readers who have only English cannot negotiate their way on the basis of a reference to a work in another language. In quoting these earlier English translations of creeds, confessions, and other sources, I have felt free to modernize spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, without calling attention to the changes each time. For the transliteration of postclassical Greek, including proper names, book titles, and technical terms, I have, despite the shifts in pronunciation, applied the system prescribed for classical Greek by my standard guide in this and all such matters, The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.), but with these exceptions, which are recommended by the ALA-LC Romanization Tables of the Library of Congress: I use the English "y" for the Greek "_" except in diphthongs, where I use "u"; and I use "ch" rather than "kh" for the Greek "_." For the Cyrillic alphabet, I have continued my long-standing practice of adapting the system prescribed by the Slavic and East European Journal, because its use of diacritical marks and of other correspondences (for example, "ch" not "kh" for the Cyrillic "_" and therefore "_" not "ch" for the Cyrillic "_," and also, of course, "Ja" not "Ya" for the Cyrillic "_") makes possible an easy and consistent movement between those Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet and those that use the Roman alphabet.

In writing Credo, more than with my many other books and multivolume editorial projects over more than fifty years, I have had ample reason to learn again just how much even a scholar who has followed Adolf von Harnack’s injunction to "be a bit of a monk and get off to a very early start" actually depends on the aid and counsel of others. Above all, Valerie R. Hotchkiss, the associate editor of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, combines an editor’s discernment with a scholar’s learning, a techie’s skill, and a librarian’s prowess, without all of which neither the set of volumes nor this book could ever have been completed. During the several years that I have devoted to the writing of the volume, and to the simultaneous editing of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, I have had the opportunity to present material from it to audiences in several countries and from many confessional (and nonconfessional, or even anticonfessional) backgrounds; as always, I have benefited greatly from their questions and criticisms, as well as from the comments of various scholarly readers, whether known or anonymous. Among the many other colleagues and former students whose advice at various stages has helped me have been (in alphabetical order): Gerald H. Anderson, C. J. Dyck, Brian A. Gerrish, Patrick Henry, Susan Billington Harper, E. Ann Matter, James J. O’Donnell, Lamin O. Sanneh, Barbara von Schlegell, Philip Shen, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Robert L. Wilken, and Charles Willard. Special gratitude, which is repeated and expanded in the "Acknowledgments" for Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, must go to the institutional sponsors of the entire project and of this book (this time in chronological order): Yale University and its several libraries; Yale University Press, for its encouragement and expertise; the Lilly Endowment, with its generous and visionary support; Boston College, which, by appointing me as the first incumbent of its Joseph Chair, enabled me to design the structure of Credo; the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, under whose auspices I wrote the bulk of it; and the Library of Congress, whose matchless bibliographical and technical resources were daily available to me in my position as its first Kluge scholar.

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Chapter 1

Continuity and Change in Creeds and Confessions

The overwhelming impression that any new reader will carry away from reviewing any of the collections of creedal and confessional texts from various historical periods listed above under "Editions, Collections, and Reference Works," or the volumes of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, must surely be their sheer repetitiveness. Above all the creeds from the period of the early church, and then once again, though this time at much greater length, the confessions from the age of the Protestant Reformation, do seem to be making the same points over and over and over again, often in the same esoteric and archaic terminology, citing the same biblical passages as proof texts, and pronouncing the same condemnations upon the same old heresies (or upon each other’s new heresies)—and all with the same sense of total self-confidence and utter rectitude. Not only are they constantly making tacit or overt cross-references to one another, in substantiation or in refutation as the case may be. But the differences between them, which came out of theological controversy and which went on to spawn still further theological controversy (and then, of course, to generate still further creeds and confessions, seemingly ad infinitum), must at least sometimes seem to any modern reader to be so minute as well as so marginal that only a specialist in historical theology would be able to tell the various confessional positions apart or, for that matter, would even be interested enough to care to do so. That impression is no less forceful even when such a reader happens to be a serious Christian believer, who cares deeply about the integrity of Christian faith and teaching.

Such repetitiveness is, of course, no accident. It is intended to condemn those who "rashly seek for novelties and expositions of another faith,"1 and above all to document—even actually to celebrate—the continuity of these creeds and confessions of faith not only with the other orthodox creeds and confessions that have preceded them but above all with what is cherished as the authentic apostolic tradition. In the opening words of his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea, the first historian of the church and himself the source for an important creed (preserved by Athanasius),2 calls this tradition "the successions from the holy apostles [tas t_n hier_n apostol_n diadochas]."3 As the use of Eusebius by later confessions suggests,4 this phrase probably refers in the first instance to the linear succession of the bishops of the church through their predecessors all the way back to the original twelve apostles, for which he himself provides some of the most important historical documentation, specifically for the diocese of Rome and the diocese of Alexandria.5 But his interest throughout the Ecclesiastical History is not only in these lists of bishops but also in the interrelations between the two concerns that a later chapter of this book, following ecumenical precedent, calls "faith" and "order," the apostolic teaching of the church and the apostolic structure of the church.6 For as the bishops who stand in the legitimate apostolic succession, according to Eusebius, are charged with responsibility for preserving and defending the true and apostolic faith of the church, so also the apostolic order of the church serves as a sign of the integrity of its faith and doctrine.7 Thus Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History is setting forth in narrative form an understanding of the relation between faith and order that was widely held throughout the early centuries of the church.8 Throughout the ensuing centuries, moreover, that understanding of continuity and change goes on characterizing the orthodox and catholic view of the relation between the changeless gospel and the creed. It is articulated epigramatically by Charles Williams, speaking about the Council of Nicaea in 325: "The nature of the Church had not changed, and only fools suppose that it had. . . . It had become a creed, and it remained a Gospel," so that in later centuries of Christian history, he continues, "the Gospels may have been neglected but the Creed never failed."9

1.1. Continuity versus Change in the Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils
Underlying the creedal and conciliar definition of orthodoxy from the beginning have been three shared presuppositions: first, that there is a straight line, of the kind Williams describes, from the Gospels to the creed; consequently, second, that the true doctrine being confessed by the councils and creeds of the church is identical with what the New Testament calls "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints";10 and therefore, third, that continuity with that faith is the essence of orthodoxy, and discontinuity with it the essence of heresy.11 On the basis of those presuppositions, the affirmation of creedal continuity and the repudiation of creedal novelty dominate the decrees of each of the seven councils of the ancient church that are recognized by both East and West as "ecumenical" and authoritative:12
Nicaea I (325).13 Already in the issuance of the first creed or statement of faith ever officially adopted to be binding on the universal church rather than merely on a local or a regional church, the creed promulgated at the first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea in 325, under the watchful eye of the recently converted Emperor Constantine I, the accompanying warnings and canons make it clear that "the catholic and apostolic church anathematizes" any and all those so-called Christians who presume to deviate from this creed or who take it upon themselves to alter it.14 Going even beyond his predecessor Constantine in backing the authority of The Creed of Nicaea with the police power of the Roman empire, Emperor Theodosius I in an edict issued on 27 February 380 equated that creed of the year 325 with the very "faith which we believe to have been communicated by the apostle Peter to the Romans and maintained in its traditional form to the present day."15 Thereby he was ascribing to Nicene orthodoxy a massive and unbroken continuity of catholic and apostolic tradition, which went back three centuries to the authority of the prince of the apostles, Simon Peter, and through him to Christ himself,16 and which was intended to be preserved unchanged for as many more centuries into the future as the world and the church militant might stand. Moreover, Emperor Theodosius forbade any change or deviation from this apostolic and Nicene faith, at pain of both temporal and eternal punishment.17

Constantinople I (381).18 The bishops (all of them from the East) who met at Constantinople for the second ecumenical council in 381, the year following this edict of Emperor Theodosius, warned no less solemnly in their first canon against changing or tampering with The Creed of Nicaea: "The profession of faith of the holy fathers who gathered in Nicaea in Bithynia is not to be abrogated, but is to remain in force [M_ atheteisthai t_n pistin t_n hagi_n pater_n . . . alla menein ekein_n kyrian]."19 But the First Council of Constantinople in 381 did not simply repeat the text of the creed that the Council of Nicaea had decreed in 325.20 Rather, in response to the new problematics of the theological situation a half-century after Nicaea, it promulgated its own "new" creed, beginning "We believe in one God the Father all-powerful, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things both seen and unseen"; among other new clauses, this creed contained a greatly amplified confession about the Holy Spirit, and therefore a more comprehensive statement of the doctrine of the Trinity than that of Nicaea had been.21 In scholarly usage this "new creed" is now usually labeled The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is the title being followed here; the title was not contemporary to its composition but is the invention of modern studies in creedal history.22 It might suggest, as was once supposed, that this was a simple revision and expansion by the Council of Constantinople of The Creed of Nicaea from 325; but there is reason to believe that it was actually an existing baptismal creed or that it was based upon one.23 But with the important substitution (or, if it was originally a baptismal creed, the restoration), in the usage of both the East and the West, of the singular "I believe [Pisteu_, Credo]" for the council’s original plural "We believe [Pisteuomen]," as well as of singulars for plurals in later verbs, and of course with the far graver substitution in the West of the formula "from the Father and the Son [ex Patre Filioque]" for the council’s original wording, "from the Father [ek patros]" in speaking about the procession of the Holy Spirit,24 it is this creed of the second ecumenical council that is usually identified as The Nicene Creed. Such is the title it bears not only in the service books of millions of worshipers who belong to the several major denominations that use it in their liturgies but also in the program notes read by millions of concertgoers, because of all the musical settings of the Latin mass.25 But the universal designation of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (which comes from 381) as The Nicene Creed (as though it had come from 325) does raise the historically and theologically important question: What can be the meaning of the verb "to abide, to remain in force [menein]," and of the adjective "sovereign, authoritative [kyrian]" in this decree of Constantinople I in 381 about the decree of Nicaea I in 325, terms that would seem to pertain not only in general to the doctrinal content but precisely to the ipsissima verba of The Creed of Nicaea, when the text of The Creed of Nicaea has not in fact remained in force as a functioning part of Christian confession and worship and is not authoritative or even familiar at all today, except for its inclusion in one or another collection of ancient creeds such as this one?

Ephesus (431).26 Fifty years after the First Council of Constantinople, a council met at Ephesus in 431, which after some difficulty achieved recognition (after the fact) and "reception" as the third ecumenical council.27 That is how it is still counted also by the Oriental Orthodox "non-Chalcedonian" or "pre-Chalcedonian" churches, which do not accept the authority of the councils after Ephesus and which have conventionally, though imprecisely, been labeled "Monophysite."28 The Council of Ephesus included in its Acts the Second Letter of Cyril of Alexandria to Nestorius, in which Cyril expresses his resolve "to remove scandals and to expound the healthy word of faith to those who seek the truth." But "the most effective way to achieve this end," Cyril continues, "will be zealously to occupy ourselves with the words of the holy fathers [en tois t_n hagi_n pater_n peritynchanontes logois], to esteem their words, to examine our words to see if we are holding to their faith as it is written [en t_i pistei kata to gegrammenon]."29 These formulas are a reference not only to the orthodox and catholic tradition in general but specifically to the creed as it was legislated and set down in writing by the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and to the very words of that first creed. And the Council of Ephesus itself, under the domination of Cyril, "decreed the following: ‘It is not permitted to produce or write or compose any other creed [heteran pistin] except the one which was defined by the holy fathers who were gathered together in the Holy Spirit at Nicaea. Any who dare to compose or bring forth or produce another creed, . . . if they are bishops or clerics they should be deposed of their respective charges, and if they are laymen are to be anathematized.’"30 But when the Council of Ephesus nevertheless went on in its Formula of Union to issue an additional affirmation of its own, beginning that affirmation with the solemn formulaic term that is employed for an official creedal statement, "We confess [Homologoumen]," it did so directly after having said that The Creed of Nicaea of 325 "is sufficient both for the knowledge of godliness and for the repudiation of all heretical false teaching,"31 which included the new "heretical false teaching" of Nestorius that had precipitated the calling of the council.32 In spite of all these vigorous espousals of creedal continuity, the third ecumenical council is far better known for its innovative change in having, with equal solemnity and formality, added to the deposit of the church’s normative teaching the identification of the Virgin Mary as Mother of God or Theotokos.33 The application of that title to her had probably begun at least a century earlier, though in the language of prayer rather than in the language of creed;34 the first incontestable use of it seems to be in the statement of faith coming from Alexander, bishop of Alexandria (d. 328).35 But only at the Council of Ephesus was it made official and binding.

Chalcedon (451).36 The Synod of Ephesus of 449 (usually called "the Robber Synod of Ephesus") had made a point of refusing to issue any new affirmation of faith. Yet the antidote to it, the Council of Chalcedon of 451, which is counted as the fourth ecumenical council, is probably known best for having issued another "new creed," The Definition of Faith of the Council of Chalcedon, which would determine the shape of the doctrine of the person of Christ for the next fifteen centuries in both East and West.37 Nevertheless Chalcedon, too, declared that in the area of creedal faith "preeminence belongs [prolampein] to the exposition of the right and spotless creed of the 318 saintly and blessed fathers who were assembled at Nicaea when Constantine of pious memory was emperor; and that those decrees also remain in force which were issued at Constantinople by the 150 holy fathers in order to destroy the heresies then rife and to confirm this same catholic and apostolic creed." There follow the texts both of The Creed of Nicaea and of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; and just as it is to the incorporation of The Creed of Nicaea in the Acts of the Council of Ephesus of 431 that we owe what is generally regarded as the most authoritative text of that creed, so it is likewise to the decrees of Chalcedon that we owe the preservation of the standard text of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, because of the fate that befell the manuscripts of the Acts of Constantinople I.38 But it should be noted that after reciting both of these creeds and calling them "the same [ta auta]" in the plural, the decree of Chalcedon uses the singular, not the plural, to declare, evidently referring thereby to the two together: "This wise and saving creed [symbolon], the gift of divine grace, was sufficient for a perfect understanding and establishment of religion."39 The two creeds, those of the Council of Nicaea from 325 and of the Council of Constantinople I from 381, could be, and are, designated by the most important successor of these two councils, the Council of Chalcedon in 451, as though they were one and the same single symbolon. At the same time, it was not a "new" action but a repetition of the decree of the second ecumenical council, when Chalcedon declared the see of Constantinople as "New Rome" to stand alongside the see of Old Rome in church authority, on the grounds "that the city which is honored by the imperial power and senate and enjoying [civil] privileges equalling older imperial Rome, should also be elevated to her level in ecclesiastical affairs and take second place after her."40 This decree, usually cited in the literature as the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon rather than as also a canon of the First Council of Constantinople, has remained highly controversial in the conflicts over jurisdiction and primacy between East and West, to the point that at Florence in 1439 the formula for reunion between Rome and the Armenians included the assertion that it was "by authority of Leo, bishop of this holy see," that the Council of Chalcedon met."41
Constantinople II (553).42 Without in any way contradicting the decree of Chalcedon that equates the creeds of Nicaea and of Constantinople, the fifth ecumenical council, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, produced a somewhat more nuanced formulation. Following upon The Edict of Justinian issued two years earlier,43 this council met to condemn "the Three Chapters"—Theodore of Mopsuestia, source for an orthodox creed closely resembling The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,44 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa—who were being defended by Facundus of Hermiane.45 Unfortunately, the only relatively complete text of it to have survived has come down to us in an ancient Latin version rather than in the original Greek, even though, once again, almost all the bishops attending the council were from the East. Constantinople II declared: "When we met together, we first of all made a confession of the faith [congregati ante omnia compendiose confessi sumus fidem illam tenere]. . . . We confessed that we believe, protect, and preach to the churches that confession of faith which was set out at greater length by the 318 holy fathers who met in the council at Nicaea and handed down the holy doctrine or creed [sanctum mathema sive symbolum]." Significantly, the Latin version uses not native Latin words but two technical terms of Greek theology, math_ma and symbolon,46 which, it seems safe to presume, appeared in the lost Greek original of the decree and were transliterated rather than translated in the surviving Latin text. The decree of the council continues: "The 150 [bishops] who met in council at Constantinople also set out the same faith and made a confession of it [eamdem fidei confessionem]"; this time, however, the translation from Greek employed Latin terminology.47

Constantinople III (680–81).48 The sixth ecumenical council, the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–81, was convoked to deal with the question of whether Christ had two wills (one for his divine nature and one for his human nature) or a single will (for his one divine-human person). It grounded its condemnation of the heresy of Monothelitism ("a single will") in the precedent of the formula of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 about two natures, with the will being seen as a function of the nature or physis and therefore dual rather than as a function of the person or hypostatis and therefore single. The Exposition of Faith of this sixth ecumenical council pledges its allegiance to the doctrinal and creedal decrees of each of the five preceding ecumenical councils one by one, "following without deviation in a straight path after the holy and accepted fathers [t_i t_n hagi_n kai enkrit_n pater_n aplan_s eutheiai trib_i katakolouth_sasa]." Then, just as Chalcedon did in 451, it specifies The Creed of Nicaea of 325 and The Creed of Constantinople of 381 as "the creed," once again employing the noun in the singular and once again reciting both creeds, with the declaration: "This pious and orthodox creed of the divine favor was enough for a complete knowledge of the orthodox faith and a complete assurance therein [eis entel_ t_s orthodoxou piste_s epign_sin te kai bebai_sin]."49 Therefore the condemnation of Monothelitism, although it does not appear as such in any of the earlier dogmatic legislation (whether or not it may properly be seen as implicit in The Definition of Faith of Chalcedon), is being presented as no more than a component part of "following without deviation" the creed and the decrees of the first five councils.

Nicaea II (787).50 Although the agenda of the seventh ecumenical council, which met at Nicaea in 787 to restore images to the worship of the church after they had been condemned and abolished (and virtually annihilated) by iconoclasm, was addressing a question that was seemingly quite different from the trinitarian and the christological issues that had been considered by the first six councils, it declared it to be its aim that the divinely inspired tradition of the catholic church should receive confirmation by a public decree. So having made investigation with all accuracy and having taken counsel, setting for our aim the truth, we neither diminish nor augment, but simply guard intact [ouden aphairoumen, ouden prostithemen, alla . . . diaphylattomen] all that pertains to the catholic church. Thus, following the six holy universal synods, in the first place that assembled in the famous metropolis of the Nicaeans, and then that held after it in the imperial, God-guarded city [Constantinople].

Then follows the recitation of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is followed in turn by a catalog of the heresies, beginning with "Arius and those who think like him and share in his mad error" and continuing with the heresies anathematized by the five councils held in the four and a half centuries between Nicaea I and Nicaea II: "To summarize, we declare that we defend free from any innovations [akainotom_tous] all the written and unwritten ecclesiastical traditions that have been entrusted to us." Among the traditions that are almost completely "unwritten," the council fathers include "the production of representational art," which is justified on the ground that "it provides confirmation that the becoming man of the Word of God was real and not just imaginary."51 On the basis of the traditional principle enunciated by Gregory of Nazianzus, "That which [the divine Logos] has not assumed [in the incarnation] he has not healed [in the redemption] [to gar aprosl_pton atherapeuton],"52 that insistence on the genuineness and the integrity of the human nature of Christ was, in its own right, the thrust of the actions of the three preceding councils in their successive rejections of the teachings that the humanity of the incarnate Logos possessed either a "nature" (Chalcedon) or a "will" (Constantinople II) or an "action [energeia]" (Constantinople III) that was, as a consequence of the incarnation, different from the nature or will or action of the human race he came to save. For, in the words of The Definition of Faith of Chalcedon, "at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved."53 At Constantinople II and Constantinople III the same had been said to be true of the difference between the wills and of the difference between the actions. From an application of this conciliar and creedal affirmation to the challenge now being posed by iconoclasm it necessarily follows, according to the Second Council of Nicaea, that this "real and not imaginary" humanity of the incarnate Logos can, and should, be depicted in the "representational art" of the icons that are part of the church’s worship, even though none of the decrees of the preceding six councils had ever drawn such an inference in so many words.

At the end even of this brief recital of conciliar decrees, the question remains: Just what can the decrees of these seven ecumenical councils claim to be doing when they, at one and the same time, affirm an unchanged and unchangeable continuity, which is embodied above all in the very text of the creed adopted by the Council of Nicaea in 325, and yet repeatedly manifest such a remarkable capacity for change? This is demonstrated in the legitimation of sacred images by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, but perhaps the most dramatically when The Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus forbids "produc[ing] or writ[ing] or compos[ing] any other creed except the one which was defined by the holy fathers" in The Creed of Nicaea,54 and nevertheless decrees the formula calling the Virgin Mary "Theotokos," which John Henry Newman acknowledges to have been "an addition, greater perhaps than any before or since, to the letter of the primitive faith."55

1.2. Patristic Thought on Continuity and Change
Yet the same development of the first seven ecumenical councils from Nicaea I in 325 to Nicaea II in 787 that raises this question of change and continuity in creeds also provides some of the historical resources that are needed for beginning to formulate an answer to it. For in one form or another, the relation between continuity and change has been a central concern of Christian thought from the beginning. All four evangelists, and above all Matthew, take great pains, in their descriptions of the events that have constituted what the apostle Paul calls "the new covenant,"56 to affirm the continuity of the life and message of Jesus Christ with the revelation that had been given to Moses and the prophets as part of the old covenant with Israel. Near the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, for example, a divine oracle in the book of the prophet Hosea, "Out of Egypt have I called my son," which, as the second half of a parallelism that begins with "When Israel was a child I loved him," clearly refers originally to the exodus from Egypt of the people of Israel as the "son" of God,57 is applied, with the formula "This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet," to the flight of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to Egypt to prevent King Herod from murdering the infant Christ.58 In some passages such as this one, it is at least possible to conclude from the Greek conjunction hina not only that a prediction or a promise given long ago by the prophets of Israel has now been fulfilled but that the very purpose of the New Testament event was to carry out the Old Testament prophecy and thus to vindicate the faithfulness of God.59 Near the end of his Gospel, therefore, Matthew describes Jesus as reacting to the effort of the disciples to spring to his defense against the arresting mob in the garden of Gethsemane by asking, "How then would the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?"60

The apostle Paul, above all in chapters 9 through 11 of his Epistle to the Romans, strives to establish both continuity and change between the two covenants, the covenant with Israel and the covenant with the church, characterizing the permanent place of the people of Israel within the divine economy, also after the coming of Jesus Christ, in language so strong that New Testament scholars are still struggling to come to terms with it.61 The locus of continuity is the covenant with Israel: the coming of Jesus as the promised Messiah means not that Israel is being called upon to relinquish its covenant but that the Gentiles are being called to participate in that ancient and continuing covenant of God with Israel. The question of the relation between continuity and change becomes, if anything, even sharper in the dramatic narrative of the Book of Acts, which begins with its opening chapter in Asia, in Jerusalem, and concludes with its closing chapter in Rome, in Europe.62 In its one-sentence summary of what was preserved during the transition from the generation of the original disciples of Jesus to the generation that followed it as this generation was eventually represented by Paul, and what would be preserved also by all succeeding generations of the church, "And they remained faithful to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,"63 the connections among those four constituent elements of faithfulness and continuity are not defined with any precision. Rather, they are left to the subsequent history of the church to make more specific through various "apostolic" structures of tradition, including eventually the creeds as well as the apostolic ministry, apostolic worship, and the apostolic writings that would ultimately be collected into the New Testament.64

The immediately ensuing battles with Marcion, with the Gnostics, and with the Montanists during the second and third centuries each raised the question of continuity and change in some fundamental way. With his exclamation "O wonder of wonders, . . . that one cannot compare the gospel with anything else!"65 Marcion affirmed the utter novelty of the Christian message by denying the continuity of the Father of Jesus Christ with the Creator God of Israel, of the New Testament with the Old, of Paul with the (other) apostles, and of Luke with the (other) Gospels. The Gnostics posited a radical discontinuity between the common faith of the church and their "higher" understanding of divine mysteries. And the Montanists laid claim to the presence of the Paraclete and Counselor promised by Christ in the Gospel of John,66 a presence that was denied to other so-called Christians. In response to these challenges to continuity, it fell to several of the ante-Nicene church fathers of the second and third centuries, among whom Ignatius of Antioch and then Irenaeus of Lyons were the most systematic spokesmen for the emerging creedal tradition,67 to articulate the "criteria of apostolic continuity" in a form that was to go on being normative throughout the history of the church.68 It is, nevertheless, only in the fourth century, after the recognition of the church by Constantine and after the Council of Nicaea, that the full implications of continuity-with-change are drawn for each of the four criteria of apostolic continuity in the passage quoted from the second chapter of Acts: doctrine, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. In that century, the formulation of continuity and change quoted earlier from the opening words of the first church history by Eusebius of Caesarea, "the successions from the holy apostles,"69 sets this apostolic continuity into conscious opposition with the "novelty-mongering [kainotomia]" of the Gnostics and other heretics.70 Following up on that opening formulation, the entire Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius is concerned to document several kinds of continuity: in the various episcopal sees, for which he produces lists of bishops on which historians are still dependent; in the "catechetical school" of Alexandria, directed by a succession of theologians from Pantaenus to Clement to Origen;71 and in the orthodox doctrines of the church, in spite of Eusebius’s own deviation, as a Semi-Arian, from what comes to be formulated as orthodox teaching.72

This widely held view, that in a basic sense it is heresy rather than a changeless orthodoxy that has experienced development by a movement through time, has led to at least one lamentable by-product. As a result of it, we are in some sense far better informed by the documents of the church about the history of heresy during the first three centuries of the church than we are about the history of orthodoxy and its creeds during that same period—and this in spite of the almost total disappearance of the writings of the heretics themselves, which later historians are compelled to try to reconstruct on the basis of the lengthy but not always fair or representative quotations from them in the polemics of the orthodox heresiologies.73 This imbalance between the history of heresy and the history of orthodoxy has been perpetuated in the work of many modern historians. In the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Christian Baur made the diversity of Christian teaching from its beginnings, as evidenced by the conflict between Peter and Paul, the basis for a brilliant and profoundly influential reinterpretation of the history of the early church.74 A century later, the work of Walter Bauer concentrated on heresy and diversity in the first century, sometimes stimulating among scholars and theologians a greater interest in these movements of thought than in what was to emerge as the normative creedal doctrine of the catholic church.75

1.3. The Doctrine of the Trinity as Example of Continuity and of Change
Nevertheless it would be quite superficial to conclude from this, as some historians and theologians have, that none of the Christian writers and defenders of conciliar creeds in the fourth and following centuries, in their static concern for what Eusebius called "the successions from the holy apostles," were paying any attention at the same time to the dynamics of this issue of continuity and change. For the doctrines legislated in the creeds and decrees of all of the first seven ecumenical councils just reviewed, first the dogma of the Trinity (at Nicaea I in 325 and Constantinople I in 381) and then the related but distinct dogma of the person of Jesus Christ (at Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, and Constantinople III in 680–81) and its application to the question of images at Nicaea II in 787, are not only the dogmatic foundation for what was to become orthodox worship and orthodox confession in both East and West ever since. They are also a key to the early Christian interpretation of the relation between continuity and change in the creed and confession of the church, thus of an understanding not only of the movement through time that heresy has taken, as the concentration of many of the sources on this issue might suggest, but especially of the historical course that has orthodoxy has taken.

Much of the creedal history of the fourth century, exemplified in The Creed of the Dedication Synod of Antioch of 34176 and the equally controversial synods of Sirmium,77 can be read as an effort to confront this very question of continuity and change in the doctrine of the Trinity, as it was raised by the development and change that went beyond the original Creed of Nicaea of 325. The language of The Creed of Nicaea, for example, uses more or less as synonyms the Greek technical terms ousia ["essence," "being," or "substance"] and hypostasis [sometimes rendered in English as "subsistence" or as "person"], in its condemnation of those who teach that the Son of God is "from another hypostasis or substance [ex heteras hypostase_s _ ousias]."78 It is a principal contribution of the fourth-century debates, and of the participation in them of "the three Cappadocians" (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa), to both the trinitarian conceptualization and the trinitarian vocabulary of subsequent generations and creeds that, by contrast with this apparently nontechnical sense of the two words, they introduce a greater measure of precision by distinguishing between them and reserving ousia for the One and hypostasis for each of the Three: mia ousia, treis hypostaseis, as the language of church and creed goes on affirming ever after.79 The continuity and change in technical terminology was subsequently to become an even more daunting assignment for the Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II, and Constantinople III, as they wrestled with the ever greater terminological complexities of the doctrines of two natures [physeis], then of two wills [thel_mata], and then of two activities [energeiai] in the one person or hypostasis of Christ the God-man and incarnate Logos. But well beyond that, the most problematic substantive change beyond Nicaea was the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The problem begins with the confusion over the language of the New Testament about the Holy Spirit, for example, Paul’s puzzling identification of "the Lord [ho kyrios]," which is usually a title for the Son, with "the Spirit [to pneuma]";80 and the confusing usage continues during the centuries before Nicaea.81 The Council of Nicaea itself did not move much beyond that. At the council the issue raised by Arianism is taken to be, in Adolf von Harnack’s classic formulation, "Is the Divine, which has appeared upon the earth and reunited man with God, identical with the highest divine Being who rules heaven and earth, or is the same semi-divine?"82 Clarifying both the doctrine about God the Father and the doctrine about the Son of God, therefore, The Creed of Nicaea specifies that the Son is "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father."83 But there is nothing about the Holy Spirit to correspond to these clauses, simply the five words: "and in the Holy Spirit [kai eis to hagion pneuma],"84 by contrast, for example, with the more ample statement about the Holy Spirit in The Apostolic Constitutions from the second half of the fourth century.85 The historical consequence was—to quote not the relativistic judgment of some modern historian of doctrine but the quite surprising statement of Gregory of Nazianzus surnamed "the Theologian," one of "the Three Hierarchs," in his Oration on the Great Athanasius—that during the quarter-century or so after the Council of Nicaea, "to be only slightly in error [about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as God] was to be orthodox."86
Then suddenly the issue broke out. In about 360, Athanasius wrote his Four Letters to Serapion.87 A few years thereafter Gregory of Nyssa delivered a Sermon on the Holy Spirit (whose authenticity has been questioned, although it is probably his).88 Perhaps in 375 his brother, Basil of Caesarea, wrote the most influential of all the treatises on the subject, On the Holy Spirit.89 In the second half of 380 Gregory of Nazianzus issued the fifth of his Theological Orations, dealing with the legitimacy of the use of the term "God" for the Holy Spirit in spite of the absence of any unequivocal instance of such usage in the Bible.90 At about the same time Didymus the Blind composed a treatise On the Holy Spirit (in Greek, though it survives only in the Latin translation by Jerome).91 The Latin treatise by Hilary of Poitiers generally known as On the Trinity (whose original title seems to have been On the Faith, De fide), which addressed the question of the place of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, was written during the years of Hilary’s exile in the East; for as has been pointed out, "only in the East could Hilary have had any knowledge of this new question of which the West would take cognizance only after a delay of many years."92 And in 381, Ambrose of Milan, with extensive borrowings from one or more of the Greek treatises just listed, put out his own De Spiritu Sancto.93 Also in 381 the First Council of Constantinople went beyond the brief formula of Nicaea by attaching to its confession of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit a declaration about the procession of the Spirit from the Father, and then a series of affirmations about the church, the sacrament of baptism, and the Christian hope as the historical works of the Holy Spirit, corresponding to the affirmations already made in The Creed of Nicaea about the historical work of creation by the Father and the historical work of redemption by the Son:

And in the Spirit, the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding from the Father, co-worshiped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets; in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. We confess one baptism for the forgiving of sins. We look forward to a resurrection of the dead and life in the age to come. Amen.94<mc>
This creedal "change" resulted in the new measure of balance, if not quite of symmetry, among the confessions of the three divine hypostases that define Christian orthodoxy from then on.

At least by hindsight, it does seem necessary to ask why it took so long before this process began. During those first three and a half centuries the church was gradually drawing out the fuller implications of each of the four elements in the capsule summary quoted earlier from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, "the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers."95 That process was by no means unilinear, but involved continual struggles to find the best words for speaking what was ultimately "ineffable [to arr_ton]" when articulating the faith of the church. The outcome of those struggles over language was highly complicated, and often almost counterintuitive. For example, a term like "fullness [pl_r_ma]," which could claim impeccable credentials in key passages of the New Testament about the relation of the person of Christ to God, such as the statement of John that "from his pl_r_ma have we all received, grace upon grace"96 and that of Paul that "in him the whole pl_r_ma of deity dwells bodily,"97 nevertheless did not manage to find its way into the creeds, perhaps because of its prominence in the heretical vocabulary of the Gnostics about the divine abyss and its emanations.98 Even the term logos did not make it into the creed, in spite of its prominence not only in the New Testament but in the subsequent theological development.99 But the term homoousios, which had less than respectable origins and which had great difficulty shaking off an unmistakable odor of heresy, is enshrined forever in The Creed of Nicaea and then in The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.100 Yet through all of this creedal controversy about the second hypostastis of the Three, the official creedal formulation of the doctrine of the third hypostasis, the Holy Spirit, had to wait.

That phenomenon of delay and then change in the doctrine of the creeds about the Holy Spirit over a very long period of time, which refutes any static definition of the relation between continuity and change, did not remain unnoticed by the participants in the developments of the half-century between The Creed of Nicaea and The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Indeed, it elicited from Gregory of Nazianzus not only the admission quoted earlier, that even after the Council of Nicaea and its creed "to be only slightly in error was to be orthodox,"101 but an interpretation of the progressive history of revelation that takes the doctrine of the Trinity both as its theological subject and as its historical modality, in a formulation that J. N. D. Kelly, a leading scholar of early creeds, has described as "a highly original theory of doctrinal development."102 In endeavoring to explain why it is that the cardinal Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and specifically the doctrine of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, was not revealed and set down all at once, Nazianzen contrasts this trinitarian development with the historical development of the requirements of the divine law from Moses to the New Testament:
<ext>In the case by which I have illustrated it, the change is made by successive subtractions [for example, of circumcision and of the dietary regulations]; whereas here perfection is reached by additions. For the matter stands thus. The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New [Testament] manifested the Son, and suggested the deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself. For it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son; nor when that of the Son was not yet received to burden us further (if I may use so bold an expression) with the Holy Ghost; . . . but that by gradual additions, and, as David says, "goings up,"103 and advances and progress from glory to glory,104 the light of the Trinity might shine upon the more illuminated. For this reason it was, I think, that he gradually came to dwell in the disciples, measuring himself out to them according to their capacity to receive him.105

As Georges V. Florovsky has summarized this remarkable passage, "The spiritual experience of the Church is also a form of revelation."106

Or to put it another way: As the historical events of the life and teachings of Jesus recorded in the four Gospels provide the church with empirical information concerning the temporal and earthly career of the second hypostasis of the Trinity, on the basis of which The Creed of Nicaea formulates its confession about him and about the eternal and metaphysical relation of the Son to the Father as homoousios; so it is the events of the history of the church from the first century to the fourth century—missionary growth, persecution and martyrdom, apostasy and sainthood, orthodoxy and heresy, discipline and worship, and the consolation of the Holy Spirit in life and in death—that provide a kind of "database" concerning the temporal and earthly career of the third hypostasis, on the basis of which The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed can frame its confession about the eternal and metaphysical relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and about the Spirit’s functioning in the church. According to this statement of Gregory of Nazianzus, a failure to recognize that the tradition of divine revelation is a living reality and a dynamic force, driven by the Holy Spirit as "lordly and life-giving,"107 is what produces heresy. But, he is arguing, the same divine logic that required a development from the doctrine of the Logos in the prologue of the Gospel of John to the homoousios of The Creed of Nicaea now necessitates a still further "change"—precisely in order to preserve the continuity. Or, to put the development into an even fuller context: there is obviously a radical change, but there is a no less demonstrable continuity, from the confession of the oneness of God voiced in The Shema of the Book of Deuteronomy to the confession of the triune oneness of God formulated in the homoousios of The Nicene Creed and The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.108 Thus continuity and change are to be seen not only as noncontradictory: they are to be seen as mutually supportive and as mutually affirming, by a process analogous in some respects to the transcendent perich_r_sis or "co-inherence" of the three divine hypostases in the Trinity.109

1.4. The Person of Christ as Exemplar of Continuity and of Change
Similarly, the movement that carried the dogma of the church from the consideration of the Trinity at Nicaea I and Constantinople I to the consideration of the person of Christ at Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II, and Constantinople III also implies that the doctrine of the person of Christ, like the doctrine of the Trinity, can serve as a key to the question of the relation between continuity and development. As the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, provides Gregory of Nazianzus with the basic outline for his formulation of the doctrine of the development of doctrine, so also the identification of the person of Christ as the exemplar both of continuity and of change appears repeatedly in the Exposition of the Song of Songs by his fellow Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa. For Gregory of Nyssa, "progress [prokop_]" is, in its most obvious sense, a way of speaking about the movement of the human soul as it ascends to God: this "ascent [anodos] of the soul" he calls "progress [prokop_]."110 But he is deeply concerned to insist that in speaking about it he is describing not some static condition or quiddity but a living reality that is dynamically changing and is constantly in motion. In one of the later discourses of the Exposition of the Song of Songs, therefore, he invokes a bold simile to make this point: as an actor changes costumes and characters, appearing now as a king and now as a commoner, so the movement of Christian virtue "from glory to glory"111 is a genuine growth and development in relation to the changing opportunities and obligations of the Christian life; and even in the life to come it will never reach satiety.112

Yet even that audacious comparison does not quite measure up to an earlier passage about prokop_ in Nyssen’s Exposition of the Song of Songs, citing the text in the Gospel of Luke, "And Jesus increased [proekopten, the verb corresponding to Gregory’s noun prokop_, progress] in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and men."113 This text goes on serving as a standard proof for the growth and human development of Jesus: Augustine, quoting the creed as well, takes it as proof that Christ "not only gave the Holy Spirit as God, but also received it as man."114 But for Gregory it becomes, as it is for his spiritual father Athanasius,115 a demonstration not only that the dogma of the full deity of Christ is consistent with the assertion of his full and genuine humanity but that Jesus the God-man is the exemplar for all growth and development:

The child Jesus born within us advances by different ways in those who have received him in wisdom, in age, and in grace. He is not the same in every person, but is present according to the measure of the person receiving him. He shows himself according to each one’s capacity. He comes either as an infant, or a child advancing in age, or as one fully grown.116

Applied to the theologians of the church, and specifically to the history of their doctrines and to the history of the church’s creeds, that christocentric definition of prokop_ contains within it the possibility of affirming both continuity and development, and of doing so simultaneously.

But to understand this view of continuity-and-development, especially in the formulation given it by Gregory of Nyssa, it is helpful to read the theology of this fourth-century Greek theologian in the light of what has been said about a seventh-century Greek theologian and commentator on the Cappadocians, Maximus Confessor:
It is the idea of Revelation which defines the whole plan of St. Maximus’ reflections . . . . However, all the originality and power of St. Maximus’ new Logos doctrine lies in the fact that his conception of Revelation is developed within Christological perspectives. . . . It is not that Christology is included in the doctrine of Revelation, but that the mystery of Revelation is discernible in Christology. It is not that Christ’s person demands explanation, but that everything is explained in Christ’s person—the person of the God-man.117<mc>
This statement that the "conception of Revelation is developed within Christological perspectives" and that "the mystery of Revelation is discernible in Christology" should be viewed in connection with a statement quoted earlier, that "the spiritual experience of the Church is also a form of Revelation,"118 and with the quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus on which that statement was a comment.119 Taken together, all of this suggests that the mystery of creedal continuity and the mystery of creedal development—and the mystery of how there can be both continuity and development—are to be interpreted dialectically, in the light of the doctrine of the person of Christ, confessed by the councils and in the creeds, as the exemplar both of continuity and of change.

1.5. Change and the "Passing" of Creeds
The ancient problematic of change and of continuity in the history of creeds, which has, of course, never been absent from the consciousness of those who studied that history, as for example the reflections of Thomas Aquinas make clear,120 moved into the center of scholarly attention during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.121 For the purposes of this introductory chapter, three examples—all, as it happens, from British thought, although it would not be difficult to provide illustrations from elsewhere, above all from German thought and scholarship122—may suffice to document the movement during those two centuries, from a static definition (and a consequent rejection) of continuity to a wistfully romantic portrayal of change and loss to an innovative effort at a redefinition of continuity that embraces change.

"The Greeks of Constantinople," according to Edward Gibbon’s hostile account of what continuity meant in orthodox Christianity, held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony: they read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity, and a succession of patient disciples became in their turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation. Not a single composition of history, philosophy, or literature has been saved from oblivion by the intrinsic beauties of style or sentiment, of original fancy, or even of successful imitation. . . . The minds of the Greeks were bound in the fetters of a base and imperious superstition, which extends her dominion round the circle of profane science.123

That Enlightenment interpretation of the orthodox dogmatic and creedal tradition in Eastern Christendom, of which Gibbon is not the only example but is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman, was to dominate much of both Protestant and secular historiography.124
Being, if anything, even more aware of change and loss than Gibbon, Matthew Arnold reflected on it in his prose and in his poetry. His deeply moving lines about the ebb and flow of the tide have often been used to describe the change in modern attitudes toward religious beliefs and creeds:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.125

Less familiar but no less apt, however, is a line from another of his poems, inspired by the reading of book 9 of Augustine’s Confessions: "Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole."126 The historical recognition that not only do "rites change," which anyone who knows the history of liturgies East and West has always acknowledged, and that "no altar standeth whole," which is so frequently documented in the history of modern persecution, but that "creeds pass," together with the historical description of the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of that process, has been a major element in "the evolution of the historical," the modern enthronement of historical change as the primary category by which to understand doctrines and creeds, as well as many other phenomena.127

In that context, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which was published in 1845 by Matthew Arnold’s doppelgänger, John Henry Newman, represents a tour de force in the effort to capture that category of historical change for the orthodox cause and thus to vindicate creeds by the very fact that they do change. "In a higher world it is otherwise," Newman writes, "but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect [i.e., mature] is to have changed often."128 He is speaking there about the church and its doctrine, which, he says, "changes . . . in order to remain the same," but what he says pertains also to himself. As he puts it elsewhere in defense of the changes in his religious opinions, "I have changed in many things: in this I have not. From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. . . . What I held in 1816, I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God, I shall hold it to the end."129
The chapters that follow are an introduction to the phenomenon of continuity and change in creeds and confessions over a period of twenty centuries, and the various collections and editions of creeds and confessions, including Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, are an extensive and detailed documentation of it: how creeds rise, and therefore also how they "pass," frequently with a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"—and, for that matter, how they sometimes rise again in a new form, even with what might at least occasionally be called a "triumphant, long, returning roar," but more often in a fashion far less dramatic but no less real.

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Chapter 2

The Creedal and Confessional Imperative

Creeds and confessions of faith have their origin in a twofold Christian imperative, to believe and to confess what one believes. The term creed comes from the first, the term confession of faith from the second. "Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’" the apostle Paul quotes the words of the psalmist to explain to the Corinthians, "we too believe, and so we speak."1 The English word creed is derived from credo,2 which is the first person singular of the Latin verb for "I believe" and is the first word in the Latin text both of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed3 (traditionally, though not as it was originally adopted by the First Council of Constantinople in 381, which has "We believe") and of The Apostles’ Creed.4 Nevertheless, it signifies not only the isolated act or state of believing (which is never, of course, an isolated state or act at all) but, more specifically, the personal and the collective act of believing in combination with the personal and the collective act of confessing the faith that is believed.5 It is also the apostle Paul who definitively sets down in his Epistle to the Romans, perhaps quoting an already existing Christian precreedal formula, the close correlation between these two acts of believing and confessing (with the classical literary figure of chiasm applied to the ordering of the two terms): "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved."6

The confessions and the teachers of many traditions draw on these words of Paul in Romans to explain the meaning both of faith and of confession, as well as the relation between the two. Expounding the creed of the West, which he quotes in a variety of forms,7 Augustine of Hippo opens one of his earliest treatises, On Faith and the Creed, with the assertion that "we cannot secure our salvation unless . . . we make our own the profession of the faith that we carry in our heart. . . . We have the catholic faith in the creed, known to the faithful and committed to memory, contained in a form of expression as concise as has been rendered admissible by the circumstances";8 and in one of his last treatises, he defines faith as "thinking with assent [cum assensione cogitare]."9 Similarly, his Western contemporary Rufinus of Aquileia points out in his commentary on the opening word of The Apostles’ Creed, "Credo, I believe," that "it is only right that you should first of all confess that you believe."10 In the East, The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church by Peter Mogila quotes these words of Paul to introduce its discussion of faith.11 In the Lutheran confessions, they provide The Apology of the Augsburg Confession with the basis for its most extensive consideration of the relation between faith and confessing the faith.12 In the Reformed confessions, they form the epigraph for The Second Helvetic Confession of 1556.13 And in the confessions of Congregationalism, they are the first proof text from Scripture for The Savoy Declaration of 1668.14

2.1. Believing and Confessing
Believing and confessing, then, have always been correlatives:15 a creedlike confession of the resurrection of Christ in the New Testament is followed by the formula, "So we preach and so you believed."16 The correlation becomes clear in the reiterations and permutations of these two terms believe and confess (often in combination with the third term, teach, to which the next chapter will be devoted) in the language of creeds and confessions throughout Christian history. An early creedal fragment, usually assigned to the third or fourth century, opens with the words "[One] confesses the faith,"17 and The Western Creed of Sardica at the middle of the fourth century, though rejected as heterodox, speaks of "the catholic and apostolic tradition and faith and confession."18 "We believe [Pisteuomen]": The Creed of Nicaea, adopted at the first ecumenical council in 325,19 and then The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, associated with the second ecumenical council in 381,20 say this as their very first word; and near its close the latter says, "We confess [homologoumen]."21 At the third ecumenical council, the Council of Ephesus of 431, the formula written by Cyril of Alexandria declares "We confess [homologountes] the Word to have been made one with the flesh hypostatically";22 and The Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus likewise begins with the word "We confess [Homologoumen]."23 The Definition of Faith of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 affirms that "following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession [homologein . . . ekdidaskomen] of one and the same Son."24 "If anyone will not confess [homologei] that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have one nature or substance . . . let him be anathema" is the first of The Anathemas Against the "Three Chapters" of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, followed by similar formulas later in the Acts of that council and concluding with the summary: "Such, then, are the assertions we confess."25 "When we met together," according to this council, "we first of all made a confession of the faith . . . . We confessed that we believe, protect, and preach to the churches that confession of faith which was set out at greater length by the 318 holy fathers who met in the council at Nicaea and handed down the holy doctrine or creed. The 150 [bishops] who met in council at Constantinople also set out the same faith and made a confession of it."26 The Third Council of Constantinople of 680–81, which is numbered as the sixth ecumenical council, stated that, "following the five holy and universal synods and the holy and accepted fathers, and defining in unison, [it] professes [homologei]."27 And the dogmatic decree of the seventh ecumenical council, held at Nicaea in 787 to condemn iconoclasm, reaffirms its loyalty to all six of its predecessors and to "the teaching of our holy fathers . . . , the tradition of the catholic church."28

Synods of the Middle Ages that were either purely Western or purely Eastern rather than ecumenical maintained this pattern of correlation between believing and confessing. The Creed of the Eleventh Synod of Toledo of 675, in response to recent errors in Spain,29 reasserts the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity by opening its statement with the formula: "We confess and believe the holy and ineffable Trinity."30 And when, four centuries later, at the Synod of Rome on 11 February 1079, The Confession of Berengar of Tours, obtained under duress, formulates the catholic doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist more precisely than any earlier official creed, confession, or council of the church ever had, it declares: "I, Berengarius, in my heart believe and with my lips confess."31 Another century later, The Profession of Faith of Valdes is introduced with the formula: "Let it be known to all the faithful that I, Valdes, and all my brethren . . . believe in heart, perceive through faith, confess in speech, and in unequivocal words affirm."32 In the East, The Definition of the Synod of Constantinople of 879–80, repeating The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, declares: "This is how we affirm [phronoumen], and in this confession of the faith [en taut_i t_i homologiai t_s piste_s] we have been baptized."33

With small variations, these ancient formulas of the seven ecumenical councils of the undivided church, and then, in keeping with the precedent set by them, of synods and confessions in both East and West, are followed by the later confessional statements both of Roman Catholicism and of Eastern Orthodoxy. At least on this point, the third session of the Council of Trent was speaking for this entire Western and Eastern tradition when it summarized the creedal and confessional imperative:

That this loving care of the council may both begin and continue by the grace of God, it determines and decrees first of all to begin with a creed of the faith. In this it follows the example of the fathers of the more revered councils who, at the beginning of their proceedings, were accustomed to make use of this shield against all heresies, and in some cases by this means alone they have drawn unbelievers to the faith, defeated heretics, and strengthened the faithful. Hence the council voted that the creed which the Holy Roman Church uses as that basic principle on which all who profess the faith of Christ necessarily agree as the firm and sole foundation against which "the powers of death shall never prevail,"34 should be expressed in the words in which it is read in all the churches.35
There follows the text of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in its Western Recension. At its fifth session, on 17 June 1546, The Decree of the Council of Trent says that it "determines, confesses, and declares [statuit, fatetur ac declarat]";36 and, at its thirteenth session, on 11 October 1551, that it "teaches and openly and without qualification professes."37 Its creedal statement, The Tridentine Profession of Faith of 1564, opens with the formula, "I, N., with firm faith believe and profess [firma fide credo et profiteor] each and every article contained in the symbol of faith which the Holy Roman Church uses," once more following this with the text of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in its Western Recension.38 The Divine Liturgy According to Saint John Chrysostom coordinates the two doctrines of the divinity of Christ and of the real presence in the eucharist with the formula "I believe, O Lord, and I confess [pisteu_ Kyrie kai homolog_]."39 According to The Confession of Metrophanes Critopoulos, the sacrament of chrism confers on believers "power and boldness fearlessly and confidently to confess their Christian faith," because "we may devoutly and correctly hold to the faith, but if we do not confess it with boldness, we are not worthy of the divine revelation."40 The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church by Peter Mogila, quoting the words of Romans 10.10 as cited earlier, defines "the orthodox catholic and apostolic faith" as "to believe with the heart and confess with the mouth one God in three persons."41 Concerning the saints as "mediators and intercessors for us with God," The Confession of Dositheus and of the Synod of Jerusalem declares that "we do not doubt, but rather unhesitatingly believe and confess";42 "and therefore," it summarizes its view of confessing the faith, "we are not only persuaded, but we confess as true and undoubtedly certain, that it is impossible for the catholic church to err, or to be deceived at all, or ever to choose falsehood instead of truth."43 "Let us hold fast to the confession," the Orthodox reply of the patriarch of Constantinople accordingly admonishes his Protestant correspondents.44
During the Reformation period, it is in the Protestant confessions of faith, more even than in the formularies of Roman Catholicism of that period, that this accent on believing and confessing, or on interpreting Scripture and "making confession," or on "believing, teaching, and maintaining,"45 is especially prominent. The First Helvetic Confession of 1536 in its German text employs the formula "we confess [bekennen wir]," for which the Latin is "we assert [asserimus]."46 The Wittenberg Articles of the same year declare: "We confess simply and clearly, without any ambiguity, that we believe, hold, teach, and defend."47 The French Confession of 1559 begins with "We believe and confess [Nous croyons et confessons]."48 The Scots Confession of the following year describes itself as "this brief and plain confession of that doctrine which is set before us, and which we believe and confess," and as "the confession of our faith, as in the following chapters"; and it proceeds to employ this phraseology throughout those following chapters: "We confess and acknowledge"; "We confess and believe"; "We believe and confess"; and "We affirm and avow."49 Its supplementary confession, The King’s Confession or Second Scots Confession of 1581, expands this phraseology to the full-blown "We believe with our hearts, confess with our mouths, subscribe with our hands, and constantly affirm before God and the whole world."50 The Belgic Confession of 1561 opens with: "We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths."51 The first chapter of The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 begins with the words "We believe and confess [Credimus et confitemur]"; the third chapter begins with "We believe and teach"; and the eleventh chapter declares, "We further believe and teach" and "We believe and teach."52 The Hussite [Second] Bohemian Confession of 1575 opens with the words: "We believe with our heart and confess with our mouth";53 most of the following articles likewise open with some such formulation. Those same words open the Brownist True Confession of 1596.54 The Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 repeatedly introduces its affirmations of various doctrines in successive articles with "We believe, teach, and confess."55 The opening words of The Reaffirmed Consensus of the Truly Lutheran Faith of 1655 are repeated in each of its eighty-eight "points": "We profess and teach [Profitemur et docemus]."56

The Anabaptist Hans Denck’s Confession Before the Council of Nuremberg likewise opens each article with the formula it employs at the beginning: "I, Hans Denck, confess";57 and it concludes with the following coda: "All this I confess from the depth of my heart before the countenance of the invisible God, to whom through this confession I most humbly submit myself."58 Almost every article of The Mennonite Confession of Faith of Dordrecht of 1632 invokes some variant on the formula "We believe and confess, according to Scripture."59 Similarly, the confessions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century groups that arose outside the mainstream of Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant teaching nevertheless keep the traditional nomenclature of the creedal and confessional imperative. The confession entitled The Fundamental Beliefs of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, issued in 1872, goes beyond the conventional identification of that church with the doctrine of the second coming and the doctrine of the Sabbath to include the principal components of faith and confession.60 The Church of Christ Scientist in its Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures includes a statement of 1879 with the heading: "Tenets of the Mother Church."61 Already in 1842 the Mormons issued Articles of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,62 and in 1887 the Quakers published The Richmond Declaration of Faith of the Society of Friends.63 And in 1916 The Statement of Fundamental Truths of the Assemblies of God declares the common doctrinal faith shared by the several Pentecostal groups making up that newly created denomination.64 The United Church of Christ in Japan Confession of Faith of 1954 introduces its reaffirmation of The Apostles’ Creed with the formula: "Thus we believe, and with the saints in all ages we confess."65 Inseparable though believing and confessing therefore are from each other in the concrete practice both of the church and of the individual, they are nevertheless distinct from each other in their meaning, already in the language of the New Testament and then in the development of the usage of the church.66

2.2. Faith Defined
It is a reflection of the difficulty of achieving consistency in Christian theological vocabulary to note that in contemporary English, including the English of various translations of the Bible, there is no verb that is an etymological cognate to the noun faith. Employing the noun, one can "have faith" or "come to faith," but the only simple verb for this is the verb believe. But the noun belief by itself does not, especially in the singular, correspond any longer to the noun faith as the word is used now: The Oxford English Dictionary rightly designates as "archaic" or "obsolete" the use of belief to refer to "trust in God; the Christian virtue of faith."67 The plural beliefs does identify the particular tenets one believes, which, if they are the particular beliefs of some Christian orthodoxy or other (howsoever this orthodoxy may be specified by the believer or by the believer’s church), may also be called "articles of faith," because of the way creeds and confessions of faith have conventionally been divided into discrete "articles": The Apostles’ Creed into twelve, on the basis of the later tradition of its composition by the twelve apostles after the ascension of Christ; and (probably later) The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed also into twelve articles;68 and then the Reformation confessions into many, as in the case of The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, preceded by The Forty-Two Articles.69 The plural faiths now designates entire systems of belief or even what we now would call "world religions," as in "the true faith" or "the Jewish faith" or "the Christian faith."70 The negative prefixes that are attached to these nouns add to the interest, and perhaps also to the confusion. Unfaith is defined as "lack of faith or belief, esp. in religion," but it is significant that fully half of the relatively few instances The Oxford English Dictionary provides for unfaith use the word as a direct antonym to the word faith.71 Unbelief, however, is much better attested and often carries the connotation, as in a quotation provided there from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of "heresies and unbelief."72 Coleridge is likewise the author of the familiar phrase "willing suspension of disbelief," which, he says, constitutes "the poetic faith."73

Because of the debates in the Reformation confessions over the doctrine of justification by faith, it should be noted that this asymmetrical relation between the noun faith and the verb believe in English (corresponding to the asymmetrical relation between the noun fides and the verb credere in the Latin of the Vulgate and of many Western creeds and confessions, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic) is paralleled by a similarly asymmetrical relation, apparently unique to English, between the noun righteousness and the verb justify (meaning "make righteous")—two terms that reflect, respectively, the Germanic and the Latinate roots of the English language. In Greek and in Latin, the passive verbs corresponding to the nouns dikaiosyn_ and iustitia, dikaiousthai and iustificari, "to be justified," are perfect cognates to the nouns. In the Greek of the Bible and of the Eastern creeds and confessions, the noun for "faith," pistis, and the verb for "to believe," pisteuein, are also perfect cognates. It does perhaps deserve mention in this connection, moreover, that throughout the Gospel of John the Greek noun for "faith" never appears, only the verb for "to believe." This may seem somewhat surprising, because John’s Gospel contains what is probably the most frequently quoted verse of the Bible on the topic of faith and believing, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."74 That verse becomes part of the words of institution in the Anaphora or eucharistic prayer of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy According to Saint John Chrysostom.75 The same text figures in the confessional controversies of Protestantism when the Arminian Remonstrance quotes it because of its apparently universalistic and therefore antipredestinarian implications,76 which the article "Concerning Divine Predestination" of the Synod of Dort of 1618–19 denies by quoting it in support of the Calvinist doctrine.77

It is not surprising in the light of the emphasis on the doctrine of justification by faith that definitions of the word faith become a standard part of many Reformation confessions.78 The Geneva Confession of 1536 describes faith as present when, "in certain confidence and assurance of heart, we believe in the promises of the gospel, and receive Jesus Christ as he is offered to us by the Father and described to us by the word of God."79 Also coming from Swiss Protestantism, but from its German-speaking rather than its French-speaking cantons, The First Helvetic Confession of the same year defines it as "a sure, firm, and solid foundation for and a laying hold of all those things for which one hopes from God, and from which love and subsequently all virtues and the fruit of good works are brought forth."80 The Second Helvetic Confession speaks of it as "not an opinion or human conviction, but a most firm trust and a clear and steadfast assent of the mind, and then a most certain apprehension of the truth of God presented in the Scriptures and in the Apostles’ Creed."81 The Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 defines it as "not only a certain knowledge by which I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also a wholehearted trust which the Holy Spirit creates in me through the gospel."82 "By this faith," according to The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, "a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein, and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth, yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come"—all of these being functions of faith.83 The Westminster Shorter Catechism of the following year defines faith in Jesus Christ as "a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel."84 And The Mennonite Short Confession of Faith of 1610 contains the definition: "This faith is a certain heartfelt assurance or inner knowledge of God, of Christ, and other heavenly things received by grace out of the word of God."85

In an effort to classify these several meanings of faith in the language of the Bible and in the usage of the creeds and confessions of the churches, the systematic theologians of the Reformation tradition distinguish among three closely interrelated senses of the word: faith as knowledge, as assent, and as trust. It is necessary to know the doctrinal and historical content of the Christian message in at least some detail, to acknowledge that the message is true, and to have personal confidence in it as reliable in life and in death; the etymological root of the English word confidence is the Latin word for "faith," fides, and from it the verb confidere. When those same theologians also speak, as they do so often, about "justification by faith," it is chiefly the third of these, faith as trust and confidence, though of course in conjunction with a presupposed faith both as knowledge and as assent, that they have in mind—or, as The Augsburg Confession already puts it in 1530, "such true faith as believes that we receive grace and forgiveness of sin through Christ."86 The definition of faith as trust also raises special questions for Calvinist confessions because of their doctrine of predestination. Defining certainty of grace and salvation as "not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion . . . but an infallible assurance of faith," The Westminster Confession of Faith nevertheless insists that "this infallible assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it."87 For it is experientially—as well as pastorally—obvious that not everyone who has faith attains existentially to the possession of this "infallible assurance" of having been eternally predestined to salvation; nevertheless, such Christians are not to doubt that they truly possess a saving "faith."88

But when these theologians of the Reformation, together with theologians of all the other Christian traditions up to the present day, speak about a "confession of faith," or about the creed as fides,89 the chief emphasis lies on the first and second meanings of the word faith, faith as knowledge and faith as assent, rather than on faith as trust. So it does also in the use of the term faith in the title of each of the five historical chapters that form the final section of this volume (and in the heading of each of the five parts of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition): "Rules of Faith in the Early Church"; "Affirmations of Faith in Eastern Orthodoxy"; "Professions of Faith in the Medieval West"; "Confessions of Faith in the Reformation Era"; and "Statements of Faith in Modern Christianity." For each of these sets of texts, a "faith" that is confessed is an objective content, something to be learned, memorized, and known, and something to be accepted on authority, acknowledged as divine truth, and vigorously defended as such against "deniers of the faith"—as well as being of course, obviously and supremely, a personal and existential declaration of obedience and trust in God and in the revealed word of God.

Among the many references to "faith" and "believing" in the New Testament, two passages in particular stand out as documenting, and having contributed to, this "objective" or creedal and confessional sense of faith as knowledge and as assent, as distinct from the "subjective" or existential sense of faith as trust. One of the passages employs the verb with a proposition "that" something is true, the other the noun with the definite article: from the Epistle of James, "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder";90 and from the Epistle of Jude, "Beloved, being very eager to write to you of our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints."91 Neither of these passages appears as part of the two most powerful and most influential discussions of the topic of faith in the New Testament: the exposition of faith and justification in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which Reformation confessions cite over and over in support of the doctrine of justification by faith alone [sola fide];92 and the "roll call of faith" in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which, locating Christian faith in the continuity of the first covenant with the people of God, one verse after another opens with the paean "By faith." The passage from the Epistle of James is often interpreted by New Testament scholars as having been provoked as a corrective on the Pauline explanations, in the Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, of the contrast between faith and works in justification, or at any rate as a corrective on how some early Christians were construing these explanations. As a result, the effort to prove, as The Second Helvetic Confession puts it,93 that "James does not contradict anything in this doctrine of ours," a doctrine that is based primarily on the writings of Paul—and thus the effort to harmonize James and Paul in accordance with Reformation doctrine—becomes one of the more challenging assignments for the exegetical case being propounded in the Protestant confessions, to which, for example, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession devotes a lengthy dissertation.94 In The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church by Peter Mogila, which is in part an Eastern Orthodox response to confessions shaped by the Protestant Reformation (including that of the sometime patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar), the first two proof texts come from James.95 Taken together, these two statements of James and Jude in the New Testament do seem to preclude any attempt to restrict the terms believing or faith to the saving faith of the believer, "subjective faith" as we have been calling it. For although the demons do believe, and believe "correctly," that is to say, accurately, and could therefore ironically be called "orthodox" in their doctrine, they are not saved by that faith, because they have knowledge and assent but not trust; and the faith that was "once for all delivered [hapax paradotheis_] to the saints" in the past, for which it is necessary to contend against its enemies in the present, does appear to have to be something "objective," a delivered content, what the Vulgate calls a depositum [fidei] that needs to be guarded,96 rather than exclusively a personal relationship between God and the believer (which, as every believer knows from repeated and bitter experience, also needs to be guarded no less zealously against the very same enemies). To make this distinction, it has become customary in theological Latin to speak about this objective faith as "the faith which one believes [fides quae creditur]" and about subjective faith as "the faith with which one believes [fides qua creditur]." Such a clarification of terms is at work in the distinction of The Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, that faith is "not only the common belief of the articles of Christian religion, and the persuasion of the truth of God’s word in general," fides quae creditur as knowledge and assent, "but also a particular application of the gracious promises of the gospel . . . an earnest trust and confidence in God," fides qua creditur as trust.97 On the basis of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and of the Eastern Orthodox tradition associated with it, The Confession of Dositheus and of the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 combines the subjective and the objective components when it defines faith as a "persuasion within us [en h_min . . . hypol_psin ]," but also specifies that this "persuasion" is to be orthotat_n, "as this is contained in the creed of the first and the second ecumenical council."98 Unlike Latin, which lacks a definite article, present-day English has incorporated this distinction into its usage by employing the definite article for the fides quae creditur, the faith which one believes, and calling it "the faith," as in the words of the Epistle of Jude, "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints";99 but it refers to fides qua creditur, faith with which one believes, without an article, simply as "faith," as in the words of the Epistle to the Romans, "a man is justified by faith."100

Reflecting their provenance in the catechetical and baptismal pedagogy of the first Christian centuries, many of the earliest creedal fragments that culminate in The Apostles’ Creed are cast in the form of question and answer: "Do you believe? I believe."101 In another early tradition, that associated with the doctrinal decrees of church synods and councils, beginning with The Creed of Nicaea in 325102 and The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed defined by the council held at Constantinople in 381,103 the standard formula is originally not singular but plural: "We believe [Pisteuomen]." But that plural of the conciliar decree likewise becomes a singular in the The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, "I believe in one God," because, according to some scholars, this creed originated as a baptismal creed. That is how it also goes on being used in the East,104 but the West uses it as the Credo for the liturgy of the Mass, and The Apostles’ Creed for baptism.105 The singular prevailed in most of the communions that continued to employ the "Nicene Creed" in their eucharistic liturgies, including Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Lutheranism. In the late twentieth century, liturgical and theological reforms, particularly those associated with the Second Vatican Council, brought about the restoration of the plural within Roman Catholicism and beyond.

Even more significant for creedal development than this oscillation between singular and plural forms of the verb "to believe," however, is the variety of grammatical constructions for the verb and the noun, in the Greek both of the New Testament and of patristic texts, including also creeds—and, to the extent that a less inflected language can reflect such nuances, also in various vernaculars, including even English—to identify the object of the believing:106

1. A simple noun, usually in the dative case, to denote the personal object of believing defined as trusting, most often God or Christ. It is employed most memorably in Romans 4.3, Galatians 3.6, and James 2.23, three passages of the New Testament that are based on the Septuagint of Genesis 15.6, "Abraham believed God [the_i]," which also employs the dative. Sometimes, particularly with the noun "faith" rather than the verb "to believe," the noun that is the object of the believing appears in the genitive case, for example, "through the faith of Jesus Christ [dia piste_s I_sou Christou]" in the Greek of Romans 3.22, which seems to mean the faith that believes in Jesus Christ rather than the faith by which Jesus Christ himself believed; grammarians often refer to this as an "objective genitive."

2. A prepositional phrase, usually with "into" (eis with the accusative case for Greek, in with the accusative case for Latin), but also with other prepositions, such as epi and en.

3. A dependent clause, believing "that [hoti] such and such is true or has truly happened," stating a doctrinal proposition that is declared to be accurate, or an event in the history of salvation that is said to have actually occurred. For in the New Testament and other Christian texts "verbs of believing, contrary to Attic usage, very commonly take hoti," to refer to believing that something has taken place in the past and/or that it is truly so in the present (or, in a conflation of believing and hoping, that it will be so in the future).107 An example of both can be seen in the words quoted earlier: "If you confess with your lips that [hoti] Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that [hoti] God raised him from the dead."108 A variant on this construction can be the use of the infinitive form of the verb.109

The grammatical constructions of The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in Greek are a combination and an adaptation of the second and third of these. Each of the three persons/hypostases of the Trinity is made the object of a believing "in": Pisteuomen eis hena theon patera . . . kai eis hena kyrion I_soun Christon . . . kai eis to pneuma to hagion. Then the distinctive titles and attributes of each are set in apposition to this accusative proper noun, also as objects of believing, for example, "the Father all-powerful, maker of heaven and of earth."110 Especially in the language of the creed about the temporal and earthly history of the second person of the Trinity as the only-begotten Son of God who became incarnate, believing "that" propositions or historical events are true takes the form of participles used as substantives in Greek, modifying, or in apposition to, the proper noun of the title (ton . . . katelthonta ek t_n ouran_n), which were turned into Latin with relative clauses (qui . . . descendit de coelis). In English, in spite of earlier more literal translations of these participial phrases or relative clauses,111 current versions render them as separate declarative sentences: "He came down from the heavens."112 The usage is somewhat different in the language about believing in the third hypostasis or person of the Trinity as "the lordly and life-giving" Spirit. The original Greek of that epithet, which is to kyrion in the neuter rather than ton kyrion in the masculine, is, strictly speaking, an adjective meaning "lordly, of the Lord," not a noun to be translated as "the Lord," as it is already with the Latin Dominum et vivificantem and would be in most subsequent translations into various languages.113 Other "objects" of believing are appended, not as though they were on the same level with the Holy Spirit, but because they represent the actions of the Holy Spirit within the history of salvation, as the predicates appended to the Father and the Son do for them: "in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."114 Sometimes these objects of believing appear with additional verbs of affirmation, as in "We confess [homologoumen] one baptism for the forgiving of sins" and "We look forward to [prosdok_men] a resurrection of the dead and life in the age to come."115

2.3. Confessing the Faith
When Christian doctrine is defined at the beginning of volume 1 of The Christian Tradition as "what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God,"116 the emphasis, in what the subtitle of that work as a whole calls "a history of the development of doctrine," is on the second member of that triad, teaching the faith (to which the next chapter of the present work will turn). But here in Credo, as well as throughout collections such as Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, the emphasis is above all on the third, confessing the faith. It should be evident by now that the relation between believing and confessing is at once very close and very complex. As Miroslav Volf has put it, "Without personal identification with Jesus Christ, cognitive specification of who he is remains empty; without cognitive specification of who Jesus Christ is, however, personal identification with him is blind."117 But just as believing turns out to have multiple meanings, so it is also with confessing. which translates the Greek verb homologein and noun homologia and their various cognates. It is in the contrast and correlation between "believing" and "confessing" that much of this complexity is identified and clarifed.118 Correlating the two terms and arguing, on the basis of the distinction between the "inner" and the "outward," that "just as inner thinking on the things of faith is as such the act of faith, so too is outwardly confessing them," Thomas Aquinas classifies these multiple meanings by making the following threefold distinction among the definitions of the terms confession and to confess, confessio and confiteri in his Latin:

1. Confession of the truths of faith; . . . this is an act proper to the virtue of faith, bearing on the end of faith. . . .

2. A confession of thanks or praise; this is the act of the virtue of latria [adoration], since its aim is to show outwardly the honor due to God, the end of latria.

3. The confession of sins; the purpose of this is the wiping out of sins, the end also of the virtue of penance.119

Within this catalog, which Thomas is summarizing on the basis of the usage of the Latin Vulgate, it is "confession of the truths of faith" as specified in his first definition that occupies our primary attention here.

It is, however, a combination of his second definition, "a confession of thanks or praise," with the third, "the confession of sins," that gives to the term confession its most celebrated literary expression ever, in the title of the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo.120 As Augustine himself puts it, confessio means "accusation of oneself; praise of God."121 By the time the thirteen books of the Confessions are completed, there is also very much "confession of the truths of faith" and of various doctrines embodied in the book, for example, one of his most important confessions anywhere of the doctrine of creation, which forms the bulk of the closing book; but all of it is being seen and portrayed through the lens of Augustine’s personal experience. Perhaps the most relevant contribution of Augustine’s Confessions to the understanding of the term confession with which we are chiefly working here is the character of a "confession" as a public statement. For although in its form the book is one long personal prayer, addressed to God in the second person singular by Augustine in the first person singular, this is in fact not only one of the longest but also one of the most public prayers ever uttered in the history of the church: new editions of it in Latin and new translations of it into various languages keep on appearing. The uniqueness of the Confessions of Augustine as literature becomes evident by contrasting it with the work most resembling it in late antiquity, the Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But the title as a designation for a work of autobiography by a man of letters goes on to have a life of its own. In the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau not only invoked but parodied it with his Confessions, written between 1766 and 1770, but published only in 1781 and 1788, after Rousseau’s death in 1778. And Leo Tolstoy, passionately concerned as he was for the radical reformation not only of his own moral character but of traditional Christianity, combined (staying with the categories of Thomas Aquinas) "the confession of sins" with "the confession of matters of faith" in his anti-Orthodox Ispoved’ [Confession] of 1882.

In the use of homologia and homologein in the New Testament, this "confession of matters of faith" seems to be seen consistently as an individual act, which it is proper to describe by a verb that is in the singular, as in the words of the apostle Paul quoted earlier: "if thou shalt confess [ean homolog_s_is] with thy mouth the Lord Jesus."122 Therefore it is apparently not, or at any rate not in the first instance, the sort of formal "creed, known to the faithful and committed to memory" of which Augustine speaks,123 but a spontaneous and individual act. The second and third forms of "confession" in Thomas’s catalog, "the confession of thanksgiving or praise" and "the confession of sins," while continuing to be individual as well, also acquired collective form and corporate language. The second, "the confession of thanksgiving or praise," flowered into the eucharistic liturgies of East and West: eucharistia means "thanksgiving," and the liturgies all contain "confessional" expressions of thanksgiving. The third, "the confession of sins," grew into the elaborate penitential systems of both the Eastern and the Western church.124 As a result of this, at least in common parlance, the word confess refers primarily to penitential confession, as when Hamlet says to his mother, "Confess yourself to heaven; / Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;"125 and the noun confessional stands for the booth in which penitent sinners make their confession to a priest and are absolved by him.126 In the usage of the Protestant churches and confessions of faith, reaction against the medieval penitential system, which begins already with the Lollards at the end of the fourteenth century127 and continues with Luther’s attack on indulgences in the ninety-five theses of 1517, leads, for example in The Lausanne Articles of 1536128 and more extensively in The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, to a definition of confession in this third sense as "this sincere confession which is made to God alone, either privately between God and the sinner, or publicly in the church where the general confessions of sins is said."129 The reason for this, according to The Westminster Confession of Faith, is that "he that scandalizeth his brother, or the church of Christ, ought to be willing, by a private or public confession, and sorrow for his sin, to declare his repentance to those that are offended."130 This emphasis leads as well to the joint recitation of the "General Confession" that becomes a decisive component of the opening section of many Protestant orders of common worship. In successive editions of The Book of Common Prayer, for example, it is followed by the "comfortable words our Savior Christ sayeth," which, without being a formal pronouncement of absolution as such, are equivalent to a general announcement of absolution.131 The public confession and general absolution are related to the unsuccessful attempt to retain private confession and absolution in some of the Protestant churches as a possibility, though no longer as an absolute obligation. Thus The Augsburg Confession insists that "it is taught among us that private absolution should be retained and not allowed to fall into disuse,"132 and The [First] Bohemian Confession of 1535 likewise asserts "that the penitent should approach a priest and confess their sins to God himself before him."133 Although Luther’s Seventeen Articles, as well as the early Anglican Ten Articles of 1536,134 concede that "penance is to be reckoned as a sacrament,"135 the later Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England can be taken to be speaking for most of the Anglican and other Reformers, including Luther, when they define that "there are two sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, baptism and the Supper of the Lord."136 It is in response to this Protestant criticism as well as to late medieval developments that The Decree of the Council of Trent addresses the doctrine of penance and confession at the fourteenth session of the council in 1551.137
The predominance of the corporate and collective form for the confession of praise and the confession of sins comes to apply also, and preeminently, to the first species of confession in Thomas’s list, "the confession of matters of faith," which is our chief business here. "To confess God," according to The Christian Catechism of the Orthodox Catholic Greco-Russian Church composed by Metropolitan Philaret Drozdov of Moscow in the nineteenth century, means "to acknowledge that he is our God, and not deny him, although for confessing him we may have to suffer, or even die."138 Even when, as noted earlier, the creedal confession opens with the verb in the first person singular, "I believe"—as it does originally in The Apostles’ Creed139 and other baptismal creeds, and then eventually in The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is The Nicene Creed of the liturgy140 and the baptismal creed in the East—it turns out that what the individual professes as a personal statement of faith necessarily has to be expressed in the exact words of the church’s creed, from which it is not permissible to deviate. This Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox usage of the terms confess and confession in the sense of a common and corporate confession of faith is shared by the Reformed and the Lutheran confessions of the Reformation era, as is evident in their very titles as well as in the passages that have been quoted from many of them. If anything, also perhaps because of the disappearance of the sacrament of penance and confession, the use of the termconfession to mean "confession of faith," both as a title for individual statements of faith and as a general concept, is more typical of Protestant than of Roman Catholic or of Eastern Orthodox ecclesiastical usage. Within Eastern Orthodoxy, the term does appear in the title of the statement of faith and doctrine prepared by Metrophanes Critopoulos as Confession in 1625, in the one written by Peter Mogila as The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church in 1638, and in The Confession of Dositheus and of the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 (as well as in the most tragic of all Eastern confessions, The Eastern Confession of the Christian Faith by Cyril Lucar in 1629). But three of these four Orthodox "confessions" were in some significant measure written as responses (and the other one as a concession as well as a response) to the Protestant "confessions" that had begun to appear in the century preceding them.141

The normative model for such acts of "confessing," whether by the individual or by the church, is none less than "Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession," as the Epistle to the Hebrews calls him,142 who, as the First Epistle to Timothy says, "in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession [t_n kal_n homologian]."143 As the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration of 1658 affirms on that basis, "Christ is the great and first confessor."144 Yet in its form, the "good confession" of Christ certainly did not consist in reciting a creed! Rather, he was in his own person the One of whose suffering and crucifixion "under Pontius Pilate" both The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed145 and The Apostles’ Creed146 would eventually speak, the one who did precisely what he said of himself in his testimony before Pontius Pilate: "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth."147 The inescapably reciprocal relation between his own "good confession," not now before a mere Roman procurator but before his Father in heaven, and the "confession" of his followers in the church is the theme of another saying of Jesus in the Gospels, translated in the Authorized ("King James") Version as: "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."148 In the version of Luke, with the retention of "confess" but with some other significant variations (especially the reference to the angels), the saying is, as the Authorized Version translates: "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: But he that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God."149 This relation between the disciple’s "confessing" and the "confessing" by the Son of man before his Father is obscured when practically all modern versions of the English Bible render the Greek verb homologein there with some other English verb than "confess," with which they usually translate that verb at other places, including the clear parallel to these passages in the words of Christ in the Book of Revelation: "I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels."150

2.4. The Content of the Confession
For the New Testament, therefore, what is to be "confessed" as well as what is to be "believed" is Jesus Christ. That means above all his lordship, as in two familiar statements of the apostle Paul, the first of them quoted here earlier and the second to be considered later as a primary instance of creedlike elements in the New Testament:151 first, "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved";152 second, "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."153 But already within the pages of the New Testament, that confession that Jesus Christ is Lord is undergoing further development, as the second quotation also suggests. Apparently in response to an early form of the Gnostic heresy, which New Testament writers perceived as a denial of the physical and human reality of the coming into flesh of the Son of God and as a dualism that, in the interest of such a denial, separated "Jesus" from "the Christ" as two separate entities, it became necessary to introduce a greater specificity of teaching into both the believing and the confessing of the church: "Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ," instead of separating Jesus from the Christ, "is a child of God," the First Epistle of John promises; and therefore also: "Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh [or: confesses that Jesus is the Christ who has come in the flesh] is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist."154 From such a "believing that" and "confessing that" it is a substantial quantitative change, but really not much of a qualitative change, to the believing and confessing of all the later creeds and confessions of faith. Thus the first significant Christian Latin writer, Tertullian, addressing himself to the "rulers of the Roman empire" in defense of "our confession of the name of Christ," presents "an exhibition of what our religion really is" in the form of the confession: "The object of our worship is the one God."155

Through that development, "confessing the faith" becomes a "confession," a formal, official, public, and binding statement of what is believed and confessed by the church. Not only do the creedal statements of later councils—for example, of the Council of Ephesus in 431156 and of the Council of Chalcedon in 451157—quote, and incorporate in their entirety, the creeds of earlier councils, above all The Creed of Nicaea as "the faith of the 318 fathers at Nicaea" and The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, "the faith of the 150 fathers," to assert their continuity with them.158 But later confessions in turn cite these creeds and councils with the same intent, and still later confessions cite earlier confessions, even within the confessional traditions of the churches of the Protestant Reformation. That is what The Formula of Concord of 1577 is doing when it identifies "the unanimous consent of our Christian faith" with "the symbol of our own age, called the First, Unaltered Augsburg Confession" of 1530.159 In a similar vein, the conclusion of The Canons of the Synod of Dort of 1618–19, after having set forth "the clear, simple, and straightforward explanation of the orthodox teaching," affirms it "to be derived from God’s word and in agreement with the confessions of the Reformed churches," and calls upon other Christians of other confessions to look both at the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century and at the synod’s own formularies, and thus "to form their judgment about the faith of the Reformed churches . . . on the basis of the churches’ own official confessions and of the present explanation of the orthodox teaching which has been endorsed by the unanimous consent of the members of the whole synod, one and all."160 The confessions of the Anabaptists and Baptists of the Reformation, too, find it necessary to set forth and expound "the articles which some brothers previously had understood wrongly and in a way not conformed to the true meaning."161 The General Baptist Faith and Practice of Thirty Congregations Gathered According to the Primitive Pattern in England affirms "that God doth command men to speak or declare that which they have learned by the teaching of the creatures," to confess the doctrine they have learned.162 And The Assembly or Second London Confession of the seventeenth-century English Baptists formulates this approach to the language of creeds and confessions as follows: "We have no itch to clog religion with new words, but to readily acquiesce in that form of sound words which hath been, in consent with the Holy Scriptures, used by others before us."163

But such declarations, together with the church law that requires confessional subscription as a prerequisite for ordination in the church,164 can easily confuse confessing and confession.165 The relation between the two was a central issue in the modern history of "confessionalism" in Germany.166 It was such an equation of "our act of confessing" with subscribing "the confessions of the Reformation" whose dangers Karl Barth was especially concerned to point out.167 He was doing so, moreover, in the very years in which, through The Barmen Declaration of 1934 under his leadership, the adherents of diverging "confessions of the Reformation" came together to carry out their own new "act of confessing," and to produce their own new "confession," in response to the Nazi threat.168 It is an indication of that equation of "our act of confessing" with subscribing "the confessions of the Reformation" that in some languages—above all in German, but sometimes also in English—the meaning of confession as "a formulary in which a church or body of Christians sets forth the religious doctrines which it considers essential; an authoritative declaration of the articles of belief; a creed" passes over, as The Oxford English Dictionary notes, into the meaning: "the religious body or church united by one Confession of Faith; a communion."169 In contemporary German, therefore, the word Konfessionskunde to designate a field of theological study means not the study of "confessions" in the narrow sense of "statements of faith" in which the term is being used here but the study of "denominations" or "communions," which includes their confessions of faith but is by no means confined to these.170 Yet in contemporary theological English, perhaps because of the rapid increase of ecumenical contacts during the twentieth century, the use of the word confession to refer to "the religious body or church united by one Confession of Faith" cited by The Oxford English Dictionary seems to have achieved considerable currency even within those Protestant churches that are not themselves identified chiefly by a creedal confession of faith. It has been pointed out that "the concept of the Church as a confessional entity (Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran etc.) is historically a late phenomenon," but that by now "confessionalism is deeply rooted in our history."171

Yet the indigenization and inculturation of creeds and confessions, which has taken a quantum leap during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,172 has also enabled, or compelled, the Protestant churches as "confessions" to reexamine the concept of "the confessional church" and the simplistic equation of "our act of confessing" with subscribing "the confessions of the Reformation" or even the creeds of the early church. Thus when, in 1951, the Protestant Christian Batak Church (H. K. B. P.) of Indonesia sought to explain itself to its Western mother and sister churches, both Lutheran and Reformed, as well as to the predominantly Muslim culture of Indonesia, it opened its statement with the declaration, "A ‘confession of faith’ is of the utmost necessity for establishing our faith and opposing heresy," and proceeded to explain that "the church, in opposing heresies which arise, continuously requires new confessions," one of which was this very Confession of Faith, setting forth what was believed, taught, and confessed by Indonesian Christian believers and churches in the twentieth century. For, they averred, just as their spiritual forebears so often had, "a Christian group cannot be called a ‘church’ if it has no confession."173 This declaration continued to hold in Indonesian Christianity.174 The other side of that declaration was the insistence of a twentieth-century theologian in India that a church that was born of the missions but that had now come of age should undertake "its own grappling with the problems of our Faith, without of course losing contact with all that comes to her through the age-long wisdom of the Church Universal,"175 as this has been embodied also in the creeds and confessions of that faith.