And His Kingdom Will Have No End

 Ninth Wednesday after Pentecost

Lectionary Texts: 

Wednesday:

Ephesians 3:18-21

John 5:19-24

Thursday:

2 Samuel 9

John 5:25-47

Today we return to our exploration of things in the Nicene Creed that are not in the Apostles' Creed.  The title of this blog is the next Nicene/non-Apostles' Creed phrase that we will study.

Why the composers of the Apostles' Creed left this phrase out seems simple to me. It's something that everyone already knew. It was common knowledge even for the newest of Christians. The Creed simply didn't need it. Moreover, it seems more and more to me to be the case that the Apostles' Creed composers were trying to write a shorter version of the creed that included all the essentials and excluded all else. 

We know much more about the composition of the Nicene Creed than the Apostles' Creed. Practically all of the fourth century Church Fathers wrote about it. Controversy surrounded its composition and its theology. A new and church-splitting controversy (the filioque controversy) would arise 500 years later. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches are still split over that one word. The Apostles' Creed provoked no such controversy until 1100 years later when the radical Reformation churches and later the Baptists, jettisoned it. If you look at it from historical perspective, the Apostles' Creed is the great unifier of Christianity. It is said and believed by Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and the majority of Protestants including the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and many other Protestant denominations. 

The near universality of the Apostles' Creed reflects the basic character of the Christianity it proclaims. There is nothing in it that any Christian (at least before the twentieth century) would have any trouble believing. The rise of secularism and extreme rationality in the twentieth century, a secularism reflected in a good portion of Biblical scholarship, has raised doubts about most aspects of the Creed. Currently there seems to be more doubt about the Virgin Birth than anything else. This doubt is far more prevelant among Protestants than Catholics or Orthodox, in good measure due to Protestants generally low evaluation of the importance of Mary in their theology, in contrast to her high importance among Catholics and Orthodox. Orthodox call her the Theotokos (Mother of God). Methodists tend to think of her as a nice Jewish girl who birthed Jesus and took good care of him. I think Methodists need to rethink Mary and her importance for the faith, although I do not have any precise opinion as to how that rethinking should result. 

I've managed in this post to say virtually nothing about the topic that is the title. Its seems as obvious to me as it did to the composers of the Apostles' Creed. The Kingdom of God is forever. 

O God of the historic creeds,

We give you thanks to all the fourth and fifth century church fathers whose faith and wisdom led to the creeds. May we come to learn the creeds better and feel them more deeply. Amen.

Faithfully,

Christian