Pohsarang Church in West Java. Public domain.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a four-part series on cultural adaptations of creeds. Check in next week for Part 2.
Framing the question
Creeds are fascinating symbols of Christianity, trying to encapsulate what it means to be Christian in a short, communally performable text. The history of conflict around credal formulations continues to reverberate through the contemporary church, from the millenia-old filioque dispute still splitting Eastern and Western churches, through to endless internet vitriol around the recent Roman Catholic 2010 revisions to the English version of the creed in the Eucharistic celebration (“one in being” vs “consubstantial;” “suffered, died, and was buried” vs “suffered death and was buried”). What is at stake? Looking at three credal texts arising from early missiological encounters in Asia a hundred years or so ago and comparing them with similar experiments in the Western tradition, this series of articles aims to educate readers about historical contexts, and stimulate thought about statements of belief, informed by major twentieth century theologians from across Christian traditions.
First, we might fruitfully review how creeds are understood to have developed. There are no explicit scriptural versions of creeds, though in a Western manuscript variant used in the influential Latin Vulgate and related texts, Acts 8:37 describes a eunuch who on being told by Philip that baptism is predicated on belief, exclaimed “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” This is conceivably a credal precursor, or perhaps a later interpolation that reflected the currency of such formulations. Early fourth century accounts start to mention formal assent to statements of belief being part of the catechetical process leading to baptism.[1] Conciliar forms of credal statements from the fourth century though served a different purpose from baptismal creeds, functioning as a committee response to heresy. Regular and empire-wide eucharistic recitation of creeds is attested by 568 AD. Already in this sketch we can see three quite different sociological roles played by creeds: first, an initiatory identity rite of commitment; second, a theo-political clarification or differentiation within the community; third, a performative enactment used to grow into a new identity. Andrew McGowan comes to a similar tripartite function of Trinitarian doctrine in the gospel of John:
The promise of truth and guidance is not an intellectual commodity or a body of knowledge such as a doctrine, but a relationship. The effect of the gift is not just growth in knowledge, or even closeness or gratitude, but incorporation into the set of relationships he has been describing. The really difficult thing about the Trinity then may be less the doctrinal complexity as the relational demand, which is of course also a promise, and which then leads us to articulate the doctrine.[2]
Past, present, and future: demand, articulation, promise; initiation, clarification, enactment.
How we grow into these three functions comprises another set of issues under the remit of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In his influential monograph on the role of doctrine in the church, George Lindbeck sketched out three approaches: the cognitive-propositional, existential-expressive, and cultural-linguistic.[3] Broadly, how we come to grow into a new understanding involves specific analyzable beliefs and justifications, hypotheses and conclusions. But that can’t be all. Our emotions also play a part, as well as our aesthetic sensibilities and values. These influence both how we take in information as well as how we communicate with others, Lindbeck’s existential-expressive. Finally, the cultural-linguistic is what McGowan refers to as relational, what is sometimes called semiotic or symbolic, a system of interacting with historical ideas, communities of people, even physical touch, that constitute an ever-evolving way to relating to the world beyond ourselves. “Truth in John does not simply mean accuracy or facts, but consistency with the nature of God, which means it has character and content. Truth is not mere information, but also a form of practice, a way of being.”[4]
The next issue to address is what makes a creed a creed, rather than doctrine, dogma, confession, articles of faith, scripture, etc, namely its form or genre. While I will return to the image of the creed as a symbol, being the seed of theological understanding, it may be pertinent to consider the issue of definitions, boundaries, and maximalism versus minimalism. One approach, arguably that taken by such ecumenical approaches as the World Council of Churches, focuses on finding a lowest common denominator that everyone at the table can agree on. The Nicene and Apostles’ creeds can and have been shoehorned into such a role by various subgroups despite not being originally meant as such. Another approach is to cover all things necessary for fully-fledged faith, as with many of the extended and polemical Reformation-era denominational confessions. Rather than such analytically technical definitions, the model I propose we consider is that of a nutshell, in nuce as Latin would have it, that the creed holds within its capacious language the potential for growing into a tree that can in generational turn, populate an entire theological forest, yet can be held within the palm of one’s hand to be transported afar and shared as a gift.
It may be useful to place Christian creeds in the context of other religious statements of belief. If we consider the variety of length of texts that religions use to represent themselves, we start from the single syllable mantras, paradigmatically the “om” of Vedic practice, to the repetition of names of deities and god, such as the “Amituofo” of Pure Land Buddhism, to single line entreaties, such as the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”), the Islamic Shahada (“There is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger”) or Jewish Sh’ma ("Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our G-d, YHWH is One”), to the relatively rarer mid-length regularly chanted yet syntactically and semantically complex credal formulations under question here, to the extended chapter or booklet-length confessions of the Protestant reformation, to single books, as with the Bhagavad Gita, or Daodejing, and then scriptures, from volume-sized compilations like the Bible or the Avestas, to entire corpora of attributable texts, taking Buddhist examples, from the sutras as the words of the Buddha, to the East Asian Tripitakas of eighty-odd volumes expanded to include monastic regulations and scholastic systemizations on top of the sutras, to the Tibetan commentaries upon subcommentaries of the Tengyurs (Tanjurs) with hundreds of volumes in each recension.
What works, and for what purpose? As a verbal proclamation, the creeds work as they share the memorability and transmissibility of the shorter texts, with the juxtaposition of distinct propositions and frames of references allowing for interplay and internal self-reference characteristic of longer works. Forms of the Nicene Creed have been central to Christianity for over seventeen centuries, with hardly any changes, or at least with changes hard fought for. My quest to explore what makes it so successful leads me to consider credal experiments of this particular form in diverse contexts in the following parts of this series, bringing us to the archipelago of southeast Asia, the turmoil of Republican China between its millenia of imperial rule and the revolution of communism, as well as colonial Bengal, a key node of Indic cultural diversity and historical memory. In each case, I will bring alongside an example from the Western Christian world to help make comparisons.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————--
[1] Paul F Bradshaw, “The Profession of Faith in Early Christian Baptism,” Ecclesia Orans 23, no. 3 (2006): 337–55; Wolfram Kinzig and Markus Vinzent, “Recent Research on the Origin of the Creed,” The Journal of Theological Studies 50, no. 2 (1999): 535–59.
[2] McGowan, Andrew. “On Bearing the Trinity.” Substack newsletter. Andrew’s Version: Thoughts on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sundays from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, June 10, 2025. https://abmcg.substack.com/p/on-bearing-the-trinity.
[3] Lindbeck, George A. 1984. The Nature of Doctrine : Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. First edition. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Westminster Press.
[4] McGowan, Andrew. “On Bearing the Trinity.” Substack newsletter. Andrew’s Version: Thoughts on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sundays from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, June 10, 2025. https://abmcg.substack.com/p/on-bearing-the-trinity.
