A Creed for the Ages

A Creed for the Ages by Nick Peters

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This is an affecting and effective meditation on the Apostle's Creed. Author Nick Peters approaches the project of understanding the Apostle's Creed by using discrete words and phrases of the creed to meditate on the traditional meaning of the phrase and explore why it should still have meaning for modern believers.

For example, Peters begins with the first phrase of the creed, i.e., “We believe” as a basis for a discussion of what faith means. He writes:

“So then, what does it mean when we say we believe? To be fair, I don't think faith is exactly what is being meant in the creed in the modern sense. Faith properly understood is not a means of knowing but is rather a response to what one knows. One shows faith on the basis of what one believes or knows. (Yes. You can have knowledge and still have faith. Why? Simple. How many times have you known something but still had to act on it to counter, say, an emotional hang-up?) For the creed, what this is saying is, “The following are statements that I hold to be true and I am willing to make a commitment to them.” One could compare it to a marriage. When you walk down the aisle, you have no way of knowing the future and sadly, too many marriages end in divorce, but you are saying “I believe that this person is someone I can trust and spend the rest of my life with.”

Peters, Nick. A Creed for the Ages: The Apostles' Creed and Today's Christian . Tektonic Plates. Kindle Edition.

Some of the observations are pure Thomism. For example, with respect to the word “Father,” Peters notes:

“God is the supreme patron and with regards to fatherhood, Paul reminds us that God is the father from whom all fatherhood comes. It's not the case that a man has a son and God's relationship with us is something like that. It's that God has his Son and has us as His adopted sons (and daughters) as a result and a man's relationship with His son is something like that. It is never the case that God is like us. It is always the case that what we have that is good is like Him.

Peters, Nick. A Creed for the Ages: The Apostles' Creed and Today's Christian . Tektonic Plates. Kindle Edition.

This is wonderful stuff from a pastoral standpoint. Peters also introduces scholarly criticisms and scholarly responses to those criticisms. The nice thing for those who are not theology nerds is that it goes down quite easily.

Nick Peters - who I know personally - is an Evangelical and I am a Catholic. As a Catholic, I had no problems with the theological approach. Even where he advises that the deuterocanonical books are “not scripture” - which, of course, they are to Catholics and Orthodox- he irenically acknowledges:

“As time went on, the wait grew more and more. In the intertestamental literature with the writings of Second Temple Judaism, we find even more hope for the coming Messiah. We see more and more about what the Messiah is predicted to be. Since there writings are not Scripture, naturally some things get wrong, but not all of them.

Peters, Nick. A Creed for the Ages: The Apostles' Creed and Today's Christian . Tektonic Plates. Kindle Edition.

OK, half a loaf.

What I particularly liked as the kind of Christian that I am is that Peters acknowledges the continuing vitality of creeds even for people who think they are beyond creeds:

“We Christians are actually people of creeds. Much of our Christian lifestyle focuses on right living, and indeed it should! We should be living a certain way if we are said to be Christians, but much of that should be based on right doctrine. What you live should be a direct outworking of what it is that you really believe.

....

The creed is a statement that connects you with those Christians from the past, Christians that lived in a world where their lives were on the line regularly and being a Christian carried a serious cost. They often also did not have the luxury of the fine resources for study you and I have. We have centuries of Christian though, a gold mine of knowledge, that we can draw from. What a waste on our part if we do not learn from it and benefit from it. I encourage you to do be benefiting from it. This is your heritage. Some of you might enjoy going to a web site like ancestry.com and learning about your family history. How much more should you be interested in learning about the history of your spiritual family?

Peters, Nick. A Creed for the Ages: The Apostles' Creed and Today's Christian . Tektonic Plates. Kindle Edition.

Amen.