belief in singular or plural
Four sermons to get through the Apostles’ Creed? Bold move.
This first sermon focuses on on the Creed’s confessions on God the Father through God the Son (up to his passion). As I’ve only been at my current pastoral post since the end of last July, and as the first Easter with my new congregation is swiftly approaching, these sermons are particularly meaningful for me.
Bullinger’s first explanation is on the nature of belief, but we’ll come back to that later.
What do we mean when we confess together, ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty’?
God is the object and foundation of our faith, as he is our everlasting and chief goodness, never weary, but always ready to meet our need. We therefore believe in God; that is to say, we put our whole hope, all our safety, and our very selves wholly into his hands, because he alone is able to preserve us and place on us all things that we need for our good.
Bullinger continues,
Also God is called Father because of the similarities he shares with our earthly fathers. For God created us, God loves us, God cares about our lives and is attentive to us; indeed, he is all these things exceedingly more so than any earthly father is. In this is declared God’s good-will toward us, and in confessing God as our Father, we also profess that God is to us gentle, generous, merciful, wishing us all things that are good for our health, and planning nothing for us but what is good and wholesome.
While this is not all that we can say about the fatherhood of God, this is truly essential for our attitudes as believers toward our heavenly Father.
Much of Christianity today is soft, weak, effeminate, sentimental, saccharine. Evangelicalism loves calling the Lord of Hosts, ‘daddy’; we revel in the access we have to Almighty God – access that was purchased by the blood of the Eternal Son – and we prance or stumble into the throne room of heaven. Our songs are limp and simpering. Our lives are careless and worldly. Our preaching is vacuous and powerless, empty and frail. Our theology is shallow; we’ve neglected the rich tradition of the centuries. Our religious leadership today is either corrupt or incompetent. I find myself disgusted and appalled by the state of the church in our today.
I’m not claiming my gut-level reaction to these very real excesses as a personal strength, because I’m constantly temped to overcorrect. I want to preach God as all-powerful, God as judge, the God of thunder and fire and trumpets on Mt Sinai, the God who shows up to Job in a tornado, the God of Joel and Revelation, the God of hell. In a generation addicted to candy-floss I want to give bracing doses of vinegar and horseradish. Wake up! God is not to be trifled with.
And these thing are true; they must be preached. We neglect these themes to our peril and the peril of our sheep. If my observations are accurate, and I do believe they are, they represent an absolutely shameful state of affairs. But my response to them reveals just as much about my own heart. Jesus looked at the Pharisees with anger, but he looked on the multitudes with compassion. The terror of the Lord God Almighty is not all that must be preached, for Jesus tells believers in a generation every bit as corrupt as our own to call upon God with the words, ‘Our Father…’.
Bullinger understood the worldliness of the church in his own day. For many of the people, they were perfectly happy with throwing a few coins to the church in exchange for a licence to sin. Maybe that wasn’t official church theology, but that’s precisely how the people took it. The clergy were awful. The depiction of Rome in the Joseph Fiennes Luther film gets it spot on. The clerical structure of Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages was almost entirely corrupt. That was the Christian world Luther and Calvin and Bullinger inherited. A world much like Christianity in AD 30 and much like Christianity today.
But worldliness wasn’t the only problem in the church in Bullinger’s time. Ordinary believers, those who were faithful, those who genuinely believed in God and his Son’s sacrifice, were oppressed under a weight of guilt they could never escape from. Assurance was deliberately withheld from the common people. You could never do enough to know that your soul was safe with Christ. It was taught as high presumption to believe that one’s sins were fully paid for.
And very early in his sermon series Bullinger points to the comfort and tenderness God’s fatherhood should bring to true believers. Yes, this preacher will expound the Law, and in great detail. Yes, he will rail against sin, not just the action but even the root and desire of sin in our very souls. Yes, he will thunder about the horrors of hell and the last judgment (soon, when we reach that article in the Creed). But he also preaches about God’s favourable disposition towards his people. God is Father. God is – towards those who seek him with genuine faith – gentle.
I’m so tempted to weaken these biblical themes because of Christianity’s abuse of them, but what of the sheep? What of the genuine sheep, the tender lambs, burdened by their sin and crushed under a weight of guilt? Is there no one to show them God’s mercy towards them, God’s good-will towards them in Christ, God’s generosity to them as his dear children, God’s kindness and affection for them? Bullinger’s exhortations on how we are to consider God are a needed rebuke to my hardness towards the sheep.
There is much more that could be said from this sermon. The emphasis on God as almighty, the consubstantiality of the Son, the glories of the incarnation, the pastoral use of teaching on the Virgin Mary, why Holy Week matters…there is so much deep theology and pastorally warm devotionally rich exposition in this sermon. I pray that studying these sermons helps me preach better to my own dear congregation.
Bullinger’s explanation of the Creed’s ‘descent into hell’ is a delicious bit of pastoral fudge: he dodges the question, not really taking a position on it, yet still managing to explain the central point beautifully. How does he do it? Amazing.
But back to the beginning, which is where I want to close. Bullinger makes a significant emphasis of the personal nature of the creedal confession: ‘I believe.’ He compares the personal nature of faith in the Creed with the corporate nature of faith in the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our Father…’). Now I have to admit that I’m not persuaded that he’s actually correct in the point he’s making, especially since the Nicene Creed begins with, ‘We believe.’ But Bullinger is certainly rhetorically and theologically correct in what he’s trying to say: true faith is personal. I don’t have true faith because everyone around me has true faith, though their true faith can certainly strengthen my faith. I don’t have true faith because my parents had true faith, though my parents’ faith certainly instills, trains, and instructs my own faith. I don’t have true faith simply because the object of my faith is true; it’s true whether or not I believe it. I have true faith because God has produced personal faith in my soul towards him. That’s what we mean what we say, gathered together with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day, ‘I believe…’.
Not only are these articles of faith to be personally held, our belief in these articles is proof of the legitimacy of our faith. Even if you’ve never heard the Creed in a church setting, you cannot be a genuine Christian and disagree with the Apostles’ Creed. Why? Because it’s a summary of the doctrine of scripture.
Whether or not these articles of faith were of the apostles’ own making, or that of the apostles’ disciples, yet it is very well known that the very doctrine of the apostles is purely contained and taught in them. These twelve articles are called also a badge, because by this sign or badge, true Christians are discerned from false.
Very well said. Having been brought up in a low-church tradition, it has been tremendously edifying and comforting to learn how to confess together with other believers in my local church today the common doctrine we share. This is not all we believe; Bullinger also went on to author a much larger confession of faith a short time after The Decades was published. But the Apostles’ Creed is an excellent introduction to and summary of the core of our faith.
‘I believe in God, the Father almighty…’ Indeed. So do all true believers.
Next, the following four articles of the Creed
