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What do we mean, as Christians, when we say "I believe" at the beginning of the recitation of the Creed?
As a starting point we might want to think about ways in which we use the word "believe"
- "Doctor Livingstone, I believe?", is a paraphrase of: I have every reason to believe, from all the information which I have, that the person I have just met is Dr. Livingstone.
- After the Battle of Hastings, William of Normandy became William I of England in 1066. We could expand this to say that a large variety of witnesses and the records they kept attest that after a battle near Hastings William of Normandy was duly crowned and named William I. This is a typical example of the way history assembles a consensus on facts.
- I believe that the two sides will soon reach an agreement. This is a bit like the first example except that it speaks of the future. The correspondent uses the facts at hand and his analytical ability to make a prediction.
- I believe the correspondent when he says that he believes that the two sides will reach an agreement. This is a typical case where we take analysis on trust on the basis of our experience of the person or organisation involved, this is contemporarily referred to as "Brand".
- I believe that the Smiths are coming to dinner. This is a rhetorical use of "I believe" to mean, "I am aware of the fact that".
Apart from the rhetorical use, belief involves taking something on trust. If we ascertain something for ourselves, like seeing a train arrive at the same time every day, it's an established fact confirmed by a timetable, not a belief; but if we come to the station at a time of day when there are no trains, we believe the timetable.
Having cleared this ground let us look at "Credo". It's important to establish that although we can assent to a form of words headed by this plural verb, we all actually believe in slightly different ways, no two of us being able to believe alike; this is why the "truth" of what we believe is different from "fact". To quote the simplest of examples, two people may point at their fathers and say "that is my father" but the truth of the two statements will be different because no two child-father relationships are identical. So when we say "credo" the commonality is not factual but it is linguistic; we, as a corporate group of people, avow certain statements in common.
But what does that call us to do personally? I am always reminded of this question when taking Confirmation classes. What, precisely, are the candidates supposed to believe and what does that mean?
Does it mean that we accept the propositions of the Creed precisely in the way that we believe things we can't personally verify?
One apparently simple answer is that we can believe whatever Jesus tells us about the Father, or the Holy Spirit, or sending out the Apostles to preach the Gospel, except, of course, that it is almost certain that the Evangelists weren't eyewitness and were basing what they wrote on the testimony of eyewitness. There are always Chinese whispers;' in this kind of communication; and in spite of massive academic research there is no satisfactory way of establishing whether Jesus said any of the words attributed to him in the Gospels.
So where does that leave us:
- First, to believe in the Christian context is not to accept without doubt, the need for discussion and further enquiry
- It is quite reasonable to believe that a supreme being, whom we call God, created the world but
- The Incarnation is a mystery which we can't believe as either factual nor philosophically plausible as in the case of creation;
- But there was a man called Jesus who lived at a certain time and said many things even if we are not entirely sure what. The way that he died is reasonably consensually accepted by contemporaries, and whatever the actuality of the Resurrection, something happened after his death which launched what we call The Church.
From then on, we have to believe that the "Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" has some way of formulating what Christians should believe. This is difficult, if we think all Christians should believe the same thing, as the said "catholic" church is divided; but because it split over a wide variety of issues, small and great, what are the benefits of all Christians believing the same things in precisely the same way?
Cardinal Newman believed that how we believe should be organic, evolving over time, as the Holy Spirit directs.
In conclusion, then:
- What is the lowest common denominator we can accept by using the word "Credo"?
- Are the Creeds the acid test of being a Christian?
- What are our obligations as Christians in exploring belief?
KC XII/13