We Believe, I Believe

In these first weeks after Pentecost, I’m going to be looking at the Nicene Creed — yes, its history and theology, but I want to focus particularly on the spirituality of the Creed. Today I’ll be focusing on the first two words in English, or the first word in the original Greek text: We believe (pisteuomen).

I’ve talked a lot previously about the conceptual realm the Greek root pist- that gets translated into English variably as faith, trust, and belief. It’s not a case of there being three different meanings of the root, but simply that English divides up something that is a unified concept in Greek. Often in my writing, I focus away from the belief aspect, because I am convinced that more often than not it’s misleading in English, because while intellectual belief is certainly part of the Greek concept, it is rarely, if ever, the focus of it: The New Testament doesn’t care much about what I think about the world; it cares a lot about where my allegiances lie: what I trust, what choose to show up for, and how I live into the responsibilities inherent in my relationships.

But at first glance, that whole push back against the focus on ‘belief’ seems to be completely undermined by the use of that pist- root here in the Creed. For what is a Creed if not a statement of belief, a list of the things Christians think are true about the world? And it certainly is that. But I still maintain that more is going here than ‘simple’ intellectual assent to a series of propositions. While in common speech we might ask “Do you believe in God?” in the same way we might ask someone if they believe in aliens or Santa Claus, when we say in the Creed “We believe in One God…” we’re doing something quite different. It’s a statement not primarily about what we think about things, but about what things we trust. It’s less like ‘believing’ in aliens or Santa and more like trusting while on a long hike that the Sun will rise in the East and our compass will point North. And so, even here in the Creed we’re well within the typical range of pist-: it’s about the beliefs we trust and are confident enough to build our lives on. That’s the spirit of the Creed.

The second element of pisteuomen is the ending, which indicates the subject of the verb, in this case, ‘We’. Here in the Global West, we don’t do much these days as ‘we-s’. We are far more comfortable with ‘I-s’. Individualism and personal freedoms are the hallmark of our society, for better or worse. And so the Creed represents a bit of a challenge. It’s not about what I believe in (though there is room for that), but about what the community of faith — not just today but for the past seventeen hundred years — believes in. There are two sides of this that I think are worth noting. First, it requires humility: we are asked to set aside our personal ideas and beliefs and trust instead the common faith of the broader community. But secondly, it is a reminder that the life of faith is not something we do on our own. We are in this together, whether we like it or not. Relationships are hard, and the Church is and has always been a remarkable failure both as an institution and as a community responsible for being as Christ to the world. And yet, still, we need others in order to live out our faith; still, we are saved together. It isn’t about me and it isn’t about you; it’s about us together, all of us — even those (and, according to Jesus’ teaching, especially those) with whom we struggle to find common cause or get along.

At the same time, however, this ‘we’ that is a current running through the whole of the Creed is not an excuse to avoid personal responsibility. And that is why there is a tradition, almost as ancient as the Creed itself, to shift the language when the Creed is recited during worship, away from ‘we’ to ‘I’. It is a common, shared faith, but it is one that we each must appropriate for ourselves. Every time we recite the Creed, it’s a kind of reaffirmation of our baptismal vows. We are opting in once again to the common faith and dedicating ourselves to it. There is a lot of wisdom in this tradition. How often throughout history — and if we’re honest, in our own lives — have ‘good’ people deflected responsibility under the guise of the collective?

And so, even here in the very first word of the Greek text, the Creed has a lot to say about Christian spirituality. It’s about belief, but specifically about the beliefs around which orient ourselves and which we trust to get us through life. And, in the juxtaposition of the ‘we’ of the text and the ‘I’ many of us recite during worship, it reminds us that it’s about a common, shared faith which each of us must appropriate for ourselves, not just at baptism, but every day.

We believe…