Understanding our Faith

Believing in Jesus Christ – the Creeds

After professing faith in God the Father, both creeds move on to express their belief in Jesus Christ. The older Apostles’ Creed does this fairly simply: “…and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…”. The Nicene Creed on the other hand goes into greater detail: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.”

All those phrases are there to make clear that Jesus is divine as well as being human. All this was necessary because of the Arians who were very prominent at the time and who had to be opposed might and main, because they denied the divinity of Jesus.

There is the insistence that Jesus was not created precisely because he is divine. He is spoken of as ‘begotten’ because of the Father-Son imagery which was being used and it was being used because it was an imagery rooted in the New Testament. 

Along with that imagery we have the repeated ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’. All these phrases are there to emphasise the equality of Jesus and the Father in their divinity.

This insistence is very strong and is rooted in the time the creed was written and their problems and controversies. Our faith, however, remains the same. We believe that in Jesus we discover a true and full human being who is as human as we are and yet we also discover that in him, God has come among us, has been translated into human flesh and blood. 

We will never understand this wonderful mystery by means of human ideas, but it is at the very core of our faith. It is a mystery in the true sense of that word – a human reality in which we find the divine. 

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 1 March 2024