CREED OR COMMONSENSE

By CHARLES JEFFRIES

first published by Faber & Faber Limited 1943.
This Edition prepared for katapi by Paul Ingram 2003.
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III - WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

The reader who reaches this point may, perhaps, consider that he has been led up the garden.
This entire preamble has brought us to nothing more than a rehash of the old out-of-date stuff.

It should, however, be remembered that so far we have been doing no more than look for an authoritative statement of what the Church claims to be the facts on which its existence and teaching are based.
Whatever else may be said about it, the Apostles' Creed does at any rate make it impossible for us to assert that there is no such statement.
If the Christian bodies which constitute an overwhelming majority of Christian people are prepared officially to stand or fall by that particular statement, we cannot avoid giving that statement consideration, even though we know that many people who certainly claim to be Christians are not prepared to stand by the whole of it, and even though the statement may not in itself strike us as highly convincing.

Let us again set the matter out in a logical way:

1. Here is a statement.
2. It is an official statement to which the great majority of Christians adhere.
3. It purports to be a statement of facts.
4. It is either a correct statement of facts or it is not.
5. If it is a correct statement of facts, we are clearly looking for trouble if we do not adjust our lives and thoughts to fit the facts as stated.
6. If it is not correct, we are equally looking for trouble if we go on the assumption that it is correct.

It is therefore worthwhile to take a good deal of time and pains to look into this statement.
We should do so without prejudice, and we should use our intelligence and common sense.
It is a public statement, and anybody is entitled to examine and discuss it freely.
If the Church is prepared to stand or fall by it, the Church must accept the consequences.

The first thing, obviously, is to determine as clearly as we can what the statement means.
 We cannot consider whether it is correct or not unless we know precisely what it claims to assert.

This statement, as quoted at the end of Chapter II, is written in English, 
and was actually put into this form in the year 1549.
It was itself a translation from the Latin, 
which in its turn was translated from a Greek original composed in its present form somewhere between AD 300 and AD400.
Its substance is, of course, much older.
This shows two things: 
first, that in substance the statement is of great antiquity; 
and secondly that we cannot necessarily assume either that the English version of 1549 corresponds exactly with the meaning of the original, 
or that it conveyed exactly the same meaning to the man of 1549 as the same words convey to the man of to-day.

Again, we notice that the statement consists of a number of short and definite assertions.
They look clear enough at first sight; 
but when we come to think them over, 
they raise a good many questions that seem to need answering.

We find ourselves at once, then, in need of some interpretation of the Creed, 
and we naturally ask whether there is any fuller statement of an authoritative nature.
There is:
and it is called THE NICENE CREED,

because, though actually drawn up at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, 
it embodies the conclusions of a General Council of the (then undivided) Church held at NICAEA in AD325.
The Christian bodies listed in Chapter II also accept this statement, though in a few cases there are some variations of detail.
That is to say, some Christians claim, within limits, the right to put different interpretations on some of the assertions in the Apostles' Creed.
This need not, however, worry us.
For our purpose, the Nicene Creed, as set out in English in the Book of Common Prayer, can be taken as a generally accepted official expansion and interpretation of the Apostles' Creed.

I am not going to fall into the trap of trying to ' re-state' the Creed;
but we must know what we are talking about, and after all things have moved a bit since the Creed was put into its present English form.
Let us, then, set down three columns.
In the first let us place the plain assertions of the Apostles' Creed.
In the second we will place the corresponding expanded version - the Nicene Creed.
In the third we will put down a series of statements representing what we take to be the meaning, in modern language, of the Christian belief as expressed in these assertions.
We must, of course, be careful not to try to juggle with the meaning so as to make it conform to our ideas of what is correct or probable.
Our job is simply to get our minds clear as to exactly what the Church is trying to say.

This table is my own shot at it, but everyone is, of course, free to do it in his own way.

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