01. Introduction

We're living in interesting and uncertain times. Political upheavals are accompanied by ideological battles and all kinds of economic instability, and many of us are faced with various existential struggles too. It's no secret that life is often very tough, and this makes it difficult to make sense of things; it's more than tricky to find our way through the world normally, and even more difficult to know what a meaningful life looks like when we are confronted with so much that doesn’t make sense. This raises the question:

How can we make sense of 'things'?

Remember Where’s Wally? You know, those picture books filled with drawings of massive crowds, where your job as the reader is to find Wally amidst all of that visual chaos? It’s not easy to find Wally, of course, but one thing’s for sure: to be able to find Wally you actually need to know what he looks like.

There’s this story from communist Russia about a man who was reported to be stealing something from the factory he was working at. The security guards were told to search his wheelbarrow every day, to see if maybe he could be caught out. Every day, however, his wheelbarrow was just filled with his usual possessions and some random pieces of junk. The guards couldn't catch the guy out. Years later, long after the factory had closed down, the security guards bumped into the man at a local bar. "Tell us," they said, "What is it that you were stealing?"

The man smiled and said: "I was stealing wheelbarrows."

The guards didn’t spot what he was stealing because they didn’t know what they were looking for. The moral of the story, therefore, is this: if what you're looking for is right in front of you, you might still miss it if you don't actually know what you're looking for. So, if we want to know how to find meaning in life, we need to know what meaning looks like. A clue can be found in the life of the early Christians. In the midst of interesting times of their own, in a world filled with all kinds of instability, they started to formulate various creeds. These were statements of belief that would act as reminders of what they could hold onto in the midst of the mess of life. These creeds were clues to a life of meaning.

Creeds can be anchors for the soul; that is, ways to emphasize and remind ourselves of what is most important and valuable. Of course, we all have creeds, although some of our creeds are unspoken. Sometimes, although not always, we can figure out what someone’s creed is by just looking at their lives: at how they spend their time, how they communicate and how they act. But there are creeds that point beyond the merely individualistic or personal dimension of our meaning-making. Some examples of such creeds can be found in the Bible. The shortest affirmation of faith, which we'll come back to later, is one example of such a creed: Jesus is Lord (Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3). And there are other 'pre-New Testament' creeds, too (See 1 Timothy 2:5, 3:16; Philippians 2:6-11; 1 Corinthians 15:3-10).

But the creed that I want to focus on here is not mentioned in the Bible: the Apostles' Creed.

Here it is:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day, he rose again; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

Some of this, or maybe all of it, will be familiar to you. Some of it may seem strange. But I want to focus on this creed because it sums up the beliefs of Christians all across the globe, from all walks of life, who are orthodox in their beliefs. The creed represents something of a 'bare-minimum' Christianity, or what CS Lewis calls "mere Christianity." In the face of all kinds of confusion, and certain squabbles and contestations, the Apostles' Creed represents the core of what Christians everywhere hold to.

I enjoy controversy, and I'm not afraid to look at theological questions from various angles that often upset others, but I recognize that playing in the theological playground is no fun if we don't have a sense of its edges. The boundaries of the theological playground are there to help us to not accidentally wander off into the street to get ridden over by a wayward philosophical bus, so to speak.

Increasingly, in the last few years, I’ve started to go back into the Great Tradition, to brush up on the fundamentals of faith; and I have found an astonishing unity there that has been incredibly encouraging and life-giving. In reading the work of many of the early Christians, I have felt as if I am being put back together. That's a pretty amazing thing to experience, given that much of what I experience elsewhere in the world seems to want to tear me to pieces. Given this experience of being put back together, I wanted to encourage others in the way that I have been encouraged.

This will take some explaining (and this is why this blog is here), but my approach to exploring the Apostles' Creed is this: to focus on the stuff of faith that remains largely uncontested in the historic, orthodox Christian faith. Whether you are Orthodox, Catholic, or from one or another Protestant stream or variation, the Creed points us to what Christians can all agree on. When times are turbulent and life is rough, it helps immensely to get back to the foundation. To be advanced in this age, in this way, means taking a step back. To be ahead of the times, we need to get to what is behind the times. This helps us to know the nature of the solid ground that we stand on. The guiding question at the root of everything I write here is this:

What is the Apostles' Creed saying, and what does that have to do with finding meaning in life?

It is especially in contemplating the Apostles’ Creed that I’ve noticed that it offers a way to answer the question of what meaning looks like. The Apostles’ Creed is a map to meaning — a guide for what a meaningful reality and life look like. Of course, a map is just a map, and the point of a map is to point us to the reality that we're meant to be traversing. In fact, much of what I write here about the Apostles' Creed will make very little sense to those who have not understood that the map does not equate to the territory. The specifics of the Christian faith often look bogus to those who look at it from the outside, and this is because the whole point of it is to see it from the inside.

The Apostles' Creed is an ancient catechism or guide to the life of faith that emerged out of the life of the early Christians. The name 'Apostles' Creed' makes it sound like the Apostles of Jesus were the ones who came up with the Creed, but this isn't right. It would be better to think of the Creed as a summary of what the twelve Apostles actually agreed upon and taught.

(For the record, the twelve apostles exclude Judas Iscariot while including the Apostle Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament)

The Creed is described by the Ancient writer Hippolytus, in his The Apostolic Tradition, as something that was said at baptism. The believer was asked three questions (Do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in God the Son? Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?) before being immersed in the water, three times, to indicate dying with Christ and being raised with him; and the Creed itself is the answer to those questions. But it is more than that. It is a guide to reading the Scriptures, and, I'm claiming here, a guide to seeking and finding meaning in the world.

So, with all of this in mind, I want to just briefly look at the first three aspects of meaning (and finding meaning) that the Apostles Creed opens up for us.

1. The first is that the Creed is about God. This may be somewhat disconcerting to those who want the meaning of life to be about them, but there is a freedom here that can only be appreciated when we enter into life with the Divine Ground of being. The Creed presumes that finding ultimate meaning in life is impossible without knowing the One who is the Transcendent Author of Life itself. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, articulates this truth by noting that our hearts are restless and unstable until they find rest and stability in God; and anyone who has stepped into the life of faith will be able to confirm this. Instability and restlessness will be found in making anything else more ultimate than the One who is Ultimate.
2. The second thing is that the Creed is about unity. The Creed suggests that God is Triune. God is "One" (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), and thus the perfection of the very notion of unity, and this unity is, paradoxically, found in three persons. The Godhead is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which is to say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all equally God. As the ancient writer Boethius puts it, God is not three gods, but always One, even though, yes, he is tri-personal. And this unity in the life of the Trinity extends to those whose faith is not misplaced, as we'll get to in a bit more detail in the next instalment. What this perfect unity shows us is that for anything to be meaningful, it must be coherent; it must all fit together within the life of God.  
3. Then, the third thing I want to point out about the Creed (for now) is that it connects believing to belonging. You could say that belonging is the context for being and believing. We belong to this God, and it is by virtue of our belonging to him that our trust in him is renewed. This is to say that belief, as the Creed presents it is not about believing that such-and-such a thing is true. Rather the Creed is about a living faith; it is about believing in the God who is Goodness itself. Maybe the word trust gets the idea across a little better. We trust in God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And it is in this trust and belonging in the One who is the source of Reality itself that we find meaning.

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Sources:

The Apostles' Creed. (Wikipedia entry).

St. Augustine. 2009. Confessions. Oxford University Press.

St. Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on 'The Trinity is one God and not three gods' by Boethius.

Hippolytus. The Apostolic tradition.

Myers, Ben. 2018. The Apostles' Creed: A guide to the ancient catechism. Lexham Press.