Why Every Christian Should Memorize the Nicene Creed

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Pastor Foley

On the nonprofit side of the house–our Seoul USA ministry to North Korea–we receive frequent requests for our statement of faith from individuals interested in contributing financially.

I consider this A Good Thing, and, in fact, since Seoul USA is a member of the International Christian Organization along with all the other Voice of the Martyrs chapters (one of our Seoul USA divisions is VOM/Korea), we actually have a shared statement of faith.

But as true as that statement of faith is about us, I’ve never liked it nearly as much as I do the Nicene Creed.

I think it’s hard for Christians today to grasp just how central–and universal–the Nicene Creed has been to believers across the broadest expanse of time and geography and denomination and language.

I’m presently reading through the magnificent Ancient Christian Doctrine series on the Nicene Creed, and I want to commend the series to every Christian teacher…and the memorization of the Creed to every Christian.

Memorizing the Nicene Creed is what Christians did for centuries in preparation for their baptism. Notes Thomas Oden in the series introduction:

During times of persecution the baptismal confession typically was memorized, not only because it was unsafe to write it down, but also because written texts made other innocent people more susceptible to charges under civil authorities. More reliable was the quiet tradition faithfully passed on verbally through the episkopoi from the apostles. The bishops’ primary task was to maintain accurate apostolic teaching without addition or subtraction.

In other words, it’s not only Christian nonprofit organizations that ought to have a statement of faith. Every individual believer should as well–and that statement of faith should be the Creed that defines the length and breadth of the teaching of the apostles, without addition or subtraction. Continues Oden:

The first article of the Nicene Creed presupposes that there is an objective body of teaching that Christians are expected to confess as their faith. This idea seems normal and natural to us, but it was a novelty in the ancient world. Neither Judaism nor any pagan religion or philosophy could claim to have a closely defined set of beliefs that everyone adhering to it was expected to publicly profess and defend against all comers.

That’s an amazing point worth much reflection. For me it conjures up no small amount of sadness since my experience has been that the idea of a defined set of beliefs that every Christian has memorized and can publicly profess and defend is a novelty in contemporary Christianity.

Fred Sanders makes this point exceptionally well in his book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything:

People who grew up under the influence of reductionist evangelicalism suffer, understandably, from some pretty perplexing disorientation. They are raised on “Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven” as the whole Christian message, and they sense that there must be more than that… Inside of reductionist evangelicalism, everything you hear is right, but somehow it comes out all wrong.

That is because when emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it still has the emphasis right but has been reduced to nothing but emphasis. When a message is all emphasis, everything is equally important and you are always shouting… The other problem is that a gospel reduced to four points ceases to make sense unless its broader context can be intuited. “The Bible says Jesus died so you can get saved and go to heaven” is a good start, the right emphasis, and a recognizable statement of the gospel–provided that it is securely lodged in the host of other truths that support and explain it.

That host of other truths? It’s the Nicene Creed. And if we’re going to be people of robust and transformational faith who value, preserve, embody, and impart the fullness of what we received in our baptism, we’d better be able to recite it–and not just some proprietary statement of faith–from memory, in the marketplace as well as in the marketing materials of our ministries:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen. 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end. 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

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An Open Letter to Matthew Lee Anderson on How Much I Liked His Book, Earthen Vessels

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Hi Matt,

Just finished your Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith.

I absolutely loved it.

The first night I stayed up until 2AM reading it, and last night until 3:30. (And then I had to put the book down and go to bed because I read p. 170 where you wrote, “We deny our mortality and creaturely status when we refuse to sleep.” Oops.)

The margins are thick with ink from my cheap hotel pen. “Why our bodies matter to our faith” is a vast scope to undertake, and yet your treatment is delightfully thorough. This is no mere pupu platter. As we say to our host simply but with deep heart in Korea after an excellent meal: I ate well.

The parts I grew from the most were ones I originally thought I might breeze through because, while obviously important, they were tangential to the reason I picked up your book in the first place (more on that in a second):

  • Homosexuality: “The language of ‘sexual identity’…glorifies sexual expression by establishing it as necessary to our humanity… [I]t is the heterosexuals who first took this step and made sexual expression a ‘need’ on which human flourishing depends” (p. 146).
  • Suicide: (From Chesterton) “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world” (p. 162).
  • Vampires: “Driven by a nearly unrestrainable desire that denies human limitations, we pour our resources into cultivating the beauty and immortality that mimics the resurrection from the dead…. We want, in other words, all the benefits of the resurrection without acknowledging our dependence upon God as mortal creatures” (pp. 168-169)
  • Sabbath: “In Exodus, the Sabbath regulations are repeated twice, and the episode in between is the construction of the golden calf” (p. 169).
  • Sin: “Sin treats the precious as though it is worthless, disregarding the intrinsic value of the things around us in favor of our own projected fantasies and dreams” (p. 229).

Extraordinary.

Matt, I cite the above not as “zingers” that made me whistle with appreciation as I read. I cite them as real treasures I will reflect on and continue to grow from personally in the days to come. Your book changed me, by the grace of God.

Moreover, your tone throughout Earthen Vessels was charitable, even and perhaps especially to those with whom you disagree. Would that more writers (including me!) do the same. Your humility continued right through to the concluding page, where rather than ending with a QED and a fist pump, you invited us as readers to pick up from where you left off. So in the spirit of that invitation to join the conversation, I wanted to let you know where your book has led me, and what I plan to do next, as a result.

Throughout the book you (rightly, in my view) raised concern over the sad state of Christian “practices” related to theology and the body, and for what passes for orthopraxy these days. Hands down, my favorite paragraph in your book was this one, on p. 191:

A holy attentiveness wherein we present the body as a ‘living sacrifice’ and the members as ‘instruments of righteousness’ has a defined shape—namely, a cross, wherein we give ourselves to others. In that sense, when determining the shape of our spiritual practices—those done to become attentive to the presence of God—we should be wary of engaging in practices that we do not see in Scripture….

A mundane spirituality is not oriented around the feelings of bodily health that we gain—though those are good—but around a life of self-giving to others, a life wherein our bodies become signs of the love of God in the world.

As you note throughout your book, this needs to be something other than Christianized yoga and more than creative prayer postures. Here I think Jesus’ own words in Matthew 7:24 are instructive: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” Jesus calls us not just to practices in general but to doing the word in specific—the only acceptable standard for orthopraxy. Thus, this cannot be a call to Christian yoga but a call to do what the church over the centuries (and across the denominations and theological divides) has affirmed as the works of mercy commended by Christ—doing good to our enemies, sharing our bread, opening our homes, visiting the sick and widows and orphans, and healing and comforting, among others.  That’s the real body theology, I reckon.

Much theological hand wringing has been done out of the concern that Christians may think they are earning their way to heaven in doing these things. But if we are grounded in the spiritual disciplines (what the church has also called the works of piety over the ages—Scripture reading, prayer, worship, self-denial, and so forth) we learn very quickly that we should not simply “do these things” (or any good things, for that matter.) Instead, we are called to do the word that we have heard—passing on in bodily form the mercy we have received from Christ and only what we have received from Christ, and doing so in such a way that, as you note above, “our bodies become signs of the love of God in the world.”

So that is where you have led me, Matthew—thanks for that. You have strengthened my interest in digging ever deeper into the bodily doing of the word that is something more than and completely other than simply doing good or doing yoga or doing ten different prayer positions in worship. Through Earthen Vessels you’ve reminded me that doing the word in our bodies must ever be rooted deeply in and circumscribed completely by a proper, comprehensive, thorough, and ongoing hearing  of the word in our souls.

I offer a salutary fist pump in your direction for a job well done.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle XII: Do Missions Often. Receive Your Provision on the Road

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Here’s a gospel reality that has been almost completely lost to the church today:

Biblically, the message of the gospel and the messenger of the gospel are “joined at the hip.”

That is, failing to welcome the messenger with hospitality is the same thing as rejecting the message of the gospel—and Christ himself.

Christ embodies this in his own life. He places himself, defenseless, in a womb—the womb of a woman betrothed to be married, whose husband contemplates divorcing her quietly to avoid shaming her.

And throughout Jesus’ life, right up through his ascension to heaven, we see him daily seeking hospitality. Consider Matthew 8:20, where Jesus says, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Seeking hospitality daily was as much a part of Jesus’ evangelism approach as was his presentation of the message itself.

Jesus trains his apostles to follow the same approach: travel with nothing, relying on the hospitality of those with whom you share the message. Check out Luke 10:1-4:

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.

It’s not because Jesus was a bad fundraiser that he sent out his messengers empty-handed. He could have made sure that his messengers were traveling wealthy philanthropists instead of seemingly needy beggars. But he had a purpose for sending out his messengers with nothing: In so doing, those willing to extend hospitality to his messengers—and thus to him—would be revealed. These hosts would be the ones to whom he himself would extend hospitality when they came to his own kingdom carrying nothing.

When we understand this principle, we can see the story of the rich young ruler in Mark 10:17-22 in a new light.

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.'” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

If the rich young ruler goes out with money, of course everyone will receive him! They will receive him because by his very appearance they will believe that if they receive him they will receive some personal benefit. And that means the gospel message and the gospel messenger stop being identical: the messenger (whether he wants to or intends to or not) now becomes a messenger of wealth and power, not of the gospel.

Worse yet, when we as messengers bring our own provisions, we rob people of the opportunity to exercise their gifts of hospitality, which—since we’re messengers of Jesus—means we rob them of the opportunity to host Christ.

We see these problems due to “hospitality inversion” happen all the time. In nearly every way the gospel is shared these days, Christians are the hosts…and those that don’t know Christ are the strangers to whom the Christians are offering hospitality.

  • Western missionaries come into a poor area, and they are well received by the people there not because the people are responding to the gospel message but rather because the people there are responding to a different message: becoming a Christian will benefit you materially!
  • Churches spend money to reach out to “strangers” in the community, trying to get them to come to the church. And when they come, they give gifts to the strangers.
  • Christian ministries hold huge evangelistic rallies, with bands and balloons and burgers—and, of course, no admission fees.

Strange challenge that we face today: Christians have too much money to need to be hosted by anyone!

How different that attitude is from the Lord Jesus. He had all the riches of heaven, and yet—as we read in Philippians 2:7—he “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” He daily was subject to our hospitality—it was indispensable to how he shared the gospel.

So in the lay church, missions is the practice of sharing the gospel by letting our enemies do good to us—from hosting us in their homes to—as Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster taught us so many years ago in their phenomenal book, Language Acquisition Made Practical)—teaching us their language right there on the mission field when we arrive knowing no language other than our own. We let strangers host us as we come in the name of the Lord, and, in so hosting us, host the Lord and welcome the gospel.

So how do we learn to be hosted by strangers and enemies in this way? According to Luke 10, we let them practice on us! And Jesus gives us specific instructions on what to do when they welcome us, and what to do when they don’t.

But how can we, with integrity, still be rich (compared to the rest of the world) and yet go out with nothing?

Here, Christ is our exemplar. Though he possessed all things, he left all things and came with nothing except the message and love of his father, which he mirrored into the world.

In the same way, we who possess a lot can still leave it all—for an hour, for a day, or, ultimately, for a lifetime—as we go with nothing except the message and love of Christ, which we mirror into the world.

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