What the Orthodox Believe: The Creed in Plain Words

What you'll notice

You'll hear it before anyone explains it. At every Divine Liturgy, a few minutes after the Great Entrance, the deacon calls out "The Doors! The Doors!" and the whole room says or sings the Creed. Go to a baptism and you'll hear it again, right after the renunciation of Satan, before the water is even blessed: the person being baptized recites it aloud, or the godparent says it for a baby who can't.¹ In the rite of confession printed in Hapgood's service book, the penitent says it too, before naming a single sin.²

So it's the first thing a Christian says, and the thing he keeps saying. It takes about a minute. You can learn it in a week of commutes, and spend the rest of your life finding out what it means.

What it's called

The Creed, from the Latin credo, "I believe." The Church's own name for it is the Symbol of Faith (the Creed's formal name; Greek Symbolon tes Pisteos); The Creed stop explains what "symbol" meant. Historians call it the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, after the two councils that wrote it, Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. Most people just say the Nicene Creed.

Here it is, in the translation this guide uses throughout:

I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds; Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made; Being of one Essence with the Father; By whom all things were made; Who, for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, And was made man. And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried. And the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures. And ascended into heaven, And sits on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spoke by the Prophets. In one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the Life of the world to come. Amen.

This is Isabel Hapgood's 1906 translation, lightly modernized: "Holy Spirit" for her "Holy Ghost," modern verb endings ("sits," "proceeds," "spoke"), and "the living" for "the quick."³ Like every Orthodox text of the Creed, it has no filioque, the Western addition "and the Son."

What's actually happening

The Creed tells a story in the order it happened, and God is the subject of nearly every verb. Take it a line at a time.

One God, the Father

The first word after "I believe" is "one." Christians inherited that from Israel's confession in Deuteronomy 6:4, and they never traded it in. The Father is "Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible": the galaxies, your kidneys, and the angels you can't see. Nothing in the world is a rival god. Everything in it is somebody's handiwork.

One Lord, Jesus Christ

Most of the Creed is about the Son, and most of that is one long sentence aimed at one idea. Arius, a priest of Alexandria, taught that the Son was a creature: the first and greatest thing God ever made, but made. The council answered with phrases that leave no room to wriggle. "Only-begotten." "Begotten of his Father before all worlds." "Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made." Begetting is family; making is workmanship. A father begets a son who shares his nature, and builds a bookshelf that doesn't.

Then the word that carried the fight: "of one Essence with the Father," in Greek homoousios (of the same essence). Whatever the Father is, the Son is: no junior god, no copy, the same Godhead. "By whom all things were made" puts him on the Maker's side of the line, as John 1:3 does.

Made man

"For us men, and for our salvation" is the hinge of the whole text. Everything before it says who he is; everything after it says what he did about us. He "came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, And was made man." Not dressed up as a man, and not visiting one: made man. The confession a new bishop reads at his consecration spells it out, that he "was made perfect man, yet remaining God."⁴ The Council of Ephesus in 431 drew the consequence for his mother: if the child she bore is God, she is the Theotokos (the God-bearer). Mary and the Saints tells that story.

Crucified, risen, ascended

"Crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate" is the most surprising name in the Creed. Why a Roman governor? Because he's a date. This happened in history, in a province you can find on a map, under an official whose name was on the paperwork. "Suffered and was buried": he really died. "The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures" borrows Saint Paul's own phrase from 1 Corinthians 15:3–4. "Sits on the right hand of the Father" is the seat of honor from Psalm 110:1 (109:1 in the Septuagint), and it means the risen man Jesus now shares the Father's throne.

Coming again

"He shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead." The angels said it on the day he ascended: "This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). Saint Cyril of Jerusalem opened a whole lecture on it around 350: "We preach not one advent only of Christ, but a second also, far more glorious than the former."⁵ "Whose kingdom shall have no end" sounds obvious until you learn that some in Cyril's day taught otherwise. He told his catechumens: "should you ever hear any say that the kingdom of Christ shall have an end, abhor the heresy."⁶ What Happens After Death? picks up the Judgment.

The Holy Spirit

The third article gives the Spirit two titles. "Lord" is the same word the Creed just used for Christ. "Giver of Life" is what he does: he moves over the waters at creation (Genesis 1:2), and he's the one through whom God will give life to our mortal bodies (Romans 8:11). He "proceeds from the Father," which is Jesus' own phrase: "the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father" (John 15:26). He's "worshipped and glorified" together with the Father and the Son, and worship is something the Church gives to God alone. And he "spoke by the Prophets": the Old Testament is his work, which is why the Church reads it as a book about Christ (Scripture and Tradition).

Saint John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, put the Orthodox reading of "from the Father" in two clauses: "we do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son," but "yet we call Him the Spirit of the Son."⁷ That's the whole filioque question in miniature, and it's taken up below.

The Church

"In one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." Catholic here has nothing to do with Rome. It comes from the Greek for "according to the whole." Saint Cyril gave his catechumens four reasons for the word: the Church "extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other"; it "teaches universally and completely one and all the doctrines" people need; it gathers "the whole race of mankind, governors and governed, learned and unlearned"; and it "universally treats and heals the whole class of sins."⁸ Apostolic means the Church still stands on what the apostles handed on and is led by the bishops who succeeded them. How the Church Is Organized has the structure.

One baptism

"I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins." One, because it isn't repeated, as Ephesians 4:5 puts it. For the remission of sins, because it's a real washing, not a membership card. How the Church applies "one baptism" to Christians coming from other churches is a longer story, told in How Converts Are Received; the rite itself is in Baptism and Chrismation.

The life of the world to come

"I look for the Resurrection of the dead": not only a soul that survives, but bodies raised. Cyril gave a whole lecture to the resurrection of the body, and it's the same lecture in which he argues from the bones of the prophet Elisha (Relics). "And the Life of the world to come." "Look for" means watch for, the way you watch the road for someone you love. Then "Amen," which is Hebrew for "so be it," and the Creed is done.

Why it matters

Saint Cyril explained why the Church bothered to boil the faith down at all: "For since all cannot read the Scriptures, some being hindered as to the knowledge of them by want of learning," and others "by a want of leisure," the Church compresses "the whole doctrine of the Faith in a few lines." He compared it to a mustard seed, one small grain carrying many branches.⁹ The Creed doesn't replace the Bible. It's the Bible's plot, agreed on by the whole Church, so that a fisherman and a professor can say the same faith in the same words.

Notice, too, what the Creed doesn't do. It never explains how one God is three, or how a baby in a manger is the Maker of heaven and earth. It rules out the explanations that make God smaller: a Son who's only a creature, a Christ who only looked human, a Spirit who isn't Lord. The Creed works like a fence around a mystery. It tells you where the edge is and leaves the field to be walked.

The Church still uses the Creed as its test. Before a bishop-elect is consecrated, he confesses the faith aloud in an expanded form of the Creed that walks through it clause by clause and adds what later councils clarified: that Christ is "one and the same in two natures," that he has two wills, and that the icons are honored but not worshipped.¹⁰ The text grew; the spine is the same.

And it's personal. In the Liturgy and at the font it's "I believe," because each person has to say it with his own mouth; The Creed stop explains why the councils' "we" became the Liturgy's "I."

Where it came from

The Council of Nicaea wrote the first version in 325 to answer Arius. The Council of Constantinople in 381 expanded it, especially the part about the Holy Spirit, and gave it the shape you just read. In 431 the Council of Ephesus ruled that no one could put forward a different creed as a rival to the one from Nicaea.¹¹ The Creed entered the Liturgy in the late fifth and early sixth centuries; The Creed stop has those dates.

Then the word. The idea behind the Western addition goes back to Saint Augustine, who taught that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together.¹² Centuries later, churches in the Latin West began adding "and the Son," in Latin filioque, to the Creed itself; it shows up in Spain by the late sixth century and was accepted at Rome in the early eleventh. The Orthodox Church kept the original wording. The Creed stop gives the two Orthodox reasons, and Orthodox and Catholic lays out both sides of the argument. The disagreement is one thread in the slow unraveling between East and West that people date to 1054, a date that works better as a bookmark than as a break (A Short History).

What you do

If you're Orthodox: learn it by heart, if you haven't. Say it at every Liturgy, out loud if your parish says it together and under your breath if one reader says it for everyone. If you're asked to be a godparent, know it cold: in the baptismal rite you may be the one saying it, aloud, for the child.¹³

If you're visiting: if you were raised Catholic or in many Protestant churches, you already know most of it, and you'll say one phrase fewer than you're used to. You're welcome to say it with the congregation, or simply to listen. Nobody will check.

Field Note: "according to the Scriptures." The Creed quotes the Bible more than it looks. "Came down from heaven," "according to the Scriptures," "sits on the right hand," "to judge the living and the dead," "whose kingdom shall have no end": every one of them is a phrase from the New Testament or the Psalms. The councils were careful to say what the apostles had said. Their most famous word that isn't in the Bible, homoousios, was there to stop people from saying less.

Go deeper

• Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures (NPNF2 7), especially Lectures 5, 15 and 18.
• Saint John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8 (NPNF2 9), on the Trinity.
• "A User's Guide to the Nicene Creed," Simply Orthodox.
• The Creed, for the moment it's said in the Liturgy.

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