Heidelcast 183: What Must A Christian Believe? (1)—Our Ancient, Universal, Christian Faith

The opinions expressed in this program are those of the host and do not necessarily reflect the views of this nation, its management or its advertisers. Listener discretion is advised. These were the sounds of the week that was. I had some people tweeting. I had some people tweeting at me about, "Oh, they won the big 10 and the big 12." Well, not bad, huh? They won two leagues. Why do they have to play Arkansas if you won two leagues? Two leagues, come on. You know, it's one of those things that I could just, I could tell it was going to escalate and then I'm sitting at the airport. And I was like, you know, look, it's the first time I've ever made a mistake, ever, ever. I know, tell me, either on the air or off the air, you can, I have ever made a mistake. Not once. So this was, this, oh, my wife is listening, this is laughing. Kelly, is it, or is it not the first time I've ever made a mistake? Perfect, perfect comedic timing. My, my second witness is, no further questions get off the stand. So this is like, why do we have her try on the glove? You just had to ask your wife, didn't you? We had them. We had them believe it was your first mistake. Dang it, Jordan. All right, so, so anyway, this is the first mistake I've ever made in my life. So it was new for me, right? It was like, oh, my God, I'm trying to take it to the club. I can show you all around the mistake club. What is this land of mistakes I've now entered? You've become very used to mistake land. It gets easier and easier to come to mistake land. Why am I a creepy person? Why do you have to do that? I don't know. Ladies and gentlemen, the story you're about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Hey, no, Scott Clark. Can I ask you a question since it's kind of, is it quasi or pseudo? I need, I don't know. I need my man, Mr. Clark to tell me the difference. He's really good with finding. Which Clark? He tweets at us all the time. Oh, okay. I thought you meant Fred Clark. No. Bill Clark. By the way, he started in the radio business too. In any way. Congratulations. I don't know if it's quasi or pseudo. Okay. I'll Google later. Well, quasi means sort of, and pseudo means false. It's the Heidelcast. The podcast devoted to recovering, reformed theology, piety, and practice. What are we talking about? We talking about practice. Not a game. Not a game. Not a game. I'm a pastor, a part-time grammarian and church historian. This is episode 183 for the week beginning Sunday, May 30, 2021. The Heidelcast is a service of HeidelBlog.net. Email Heidelcast and HeidelBlog.net. Send us a message, and we may use it in a future podcast. Call my Heidelphone anytime at 760-618-1563. 760-618-1563. Leave a message. Or send a voice memo to Heidelcast and Heidelcast. HeidelBlog.net. And we may use that in a future podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and Apple Podcasts or anywhere. Good podcasts are found and be sure to leave us a five-star rating. So that others can find the podcast. So, please tell me about the cowbell. Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell. This is episode one in this series. What must a Christian believe? And I chose this title for two reasons. One, since I began in pastoral ministry in 1987, it's one of the questions that I have received most often. And two, it is question 22 of the Heidelberg Catechism. And this is the Heidelcast. And we are all about the Heidelberg Catechism here on the Heidelcast. For some modern Christians, the only thing that one really needs to believe in is belief. They put their faith in the quality of their faith. For others, what matters is that they walk the aisle during an alter call or after a revival. Or for still others, what matters is that they had the right quality of religious experience during the praise session of worship service. For still others, the question is not what must a Christian believe. But in whom? And the answer, of course, is Jesus. And superficially, this sounds pious. But at the moment, we answer that question. We have to ask and answer others. Who is Jesus? And what did He do? Why should we believe in Him? Where is He now? And is He coming back? And so the question, what must a Christian believe is an unavoidable question? Because all those questions, you know, who is He? What did He do? Where is He? Those are all doctrinal questions. Those are all questions about what must we believe? And so that question, that general question, is unavoidable. Scripture gives us short summaries of the faith to answer the question. And the shortest of these, of course, is Deuteronomy 64. Hero is real. Yahweh, our God, Yahweh is one. Shema is lie-el, Yahweh, Elohenu. Yahweh. Ahad. We'll come back to that in a moment. But the question is, what does it mean? The reality is that it is not, and never has been enough merely, to repeat Scripture. Those who merely repeat Scripture, who refuse to read Scripture with the church, who refuse to confess the faith, are known as Biblical. I didn't say Biblical, there is a big and important distinction to be made. This is the idle cast. A Biblicalist refuses to use the language that has been used by the church, which comes from outside of Scripture, at least some of it comes from outside of Scripture, to help us articulate what Scripture intends to teach. You know, we don't do this in any other sphere, right? Refuse to use language outside the discipline to explain the discipline, because that is not how learning works. Even Scripture itself uses language and cultural forms from outside of Scripture, the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15, where Abraham cut up animals, and our Lord then went between the pieces. You remember that? Well, that is the way that treaties were made between nations in the ancient world. When the Apostle John used the noun Logos in Greek, in John 1, 1, in the beginning was the Logos, the Word, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was using a term that Greek philosophers had been using for hundreds of years. He was radically redefining that term, and that's important. But he certainly used a term that comes from outside of Scripture. The Apostle Paul quoted pagan poets to make a point. In other words, the writers of Scripture were not themselves Biblicalists. The writers of Scripture borrowed from the world around them to explain what Scripture says and means to say. Biblicalism does not come from Scripture. It comes from rationalism, and by that I mean the movement in the history of thought, that is manifested itself in many ways and in many places, that places human reason above Scripture. In the fourth century, Arius and his followers denied the Christian doctrine of the deity of the Son of God, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit. They said that the Son was like the Father, but he was not of the same essence as the Father. They said that he was, in fact, the most ancient of all the creatures. At Naisia, the semi-Aryans proposed a confession composed of quotations exclusively from Scripture. I know who could object to that because it's Scripture. Well, I can, because what was in dispute at Naisia was not what Scripture says, but what it intends to teach, what it means to say, and what inferences we are entitled to, or even required to draw from Holy Scripture. And so the church very wisely, the ecumenical church, rejected the approach of the Biblicalists, the Arians, in the fourth century. In the seventeenth century, the Socians followed the pattern of the Arians. They were rationalists. They put reason over Scripture, and they published a catechism in 1604. Because they put reason over Scripture, they denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ. They pretended to be following Scripture, but they were Biblicalists. In one of their catechisms published by an English Socian named John Biddle, he asked questions, and then answered them, not even with quotations from Scripture, but just with Bible references. He did that in order to make his denial of the teaching of the Bible appear to be Biblical. And here I won't say much about this, but But the folks who are advocating the eternal subordination of the Sun, E-S-S, or the eternal functional subordination of the Sun, E-F-S ought to take note of the history of the Church. They ought to take a pause, as it were. Go back and reconsider whether their doctrine is being driven by the heartbeat, for example, of Scripture as confessed at Nicaea, or is it being driven by something else? Are they going back to Nicaea and the other ecumenical creeds as it suits them, or is their way of thinking and their way of doing theology the way that the Church has historically done it, or are they just assuming that the way they're doing theology is the way the Church has done it? Have they actually checked? I think that's a really important point. Is the way that we're doing theology? Is the way we're reading Scripture really ecumenical, or are we just assuming that well, of course? This is what the Church must always have said, and this is the way the Church must always have spoken, because it might not be so. Okay, all Christians believe the Bible, but all Christians have always confessed what the Bible means. Now, some of what I have to say in this section of the episode comes from a little article I wrote for Table Talk magazine a few years ago. The title is "The Role of Creads and Confessions in Doing Theology." I will link to that in the show notes. As I said, the Bible itself has confessions. I mentioned Deuteronomy 6.4, it's known as the Shemaah. After the Hebrew word translated as "hear" in Deuteronomy 6.4, it's the most basic Israelite confession, and it was repeated weekly in the synagogue during the inter-testimental period and in the New Testament period. Arloid himself quoted it in Mark 12.29, and Paul refers to it in Romans 3.30 and in Galatians 3.20. James alludes to the early Christian, or Jewish, Christian practice of reciting the Shemaah in James 2.19. There are also confessional expressions, other confessional expressions in the New Testament. For example, 1 Timothy 3.16 is one of my favorite places to go. The Apostle Paul quotes a confession that was apparently used in the churches, and the confession is brief, but you can hear if you're familiar with the use of confessions and worship, you can hear the liturgical pattern here. Great indeed, we confess is the mystery of godliness. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. Each one of those lines actually begins with a verb, manifested, vindicated, seen, proclaimed, believed, taken. Those are indicators that is a very intentional, deliberate structure. So the Shemaah, and 1 Timothy 3.16 are brief accounts of the faith that touch on key aspects of the Christian faith. God is one. Jesus is God the Son incarnate, the ascended Lord and Savior. The Holy Spirit raised him from the dead, and we are united to Christ by grace alone through faith alone. Paul calls these formulas, trustworthy sayings. And you see this in 1 Timothy 1, 15, 3, 1, 4, 9, in 2 Timothy 2, 11, and Titus 3, 8. And so we know that there are these trustworthy sayings that were known to the church, and Paul is able to invoke them several times in those two epistles, right? Or 3, 1 Timothy 2 Timothy and Titus 3, 8. These are short summaries of Christian faith and practice. Our Lord Himself commands us to confess the faith. He said, "So everyone who confesses me before men, I will also confess before my Father, who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I will also deny before my Father, who is in heaven." That's Matthew 10, 32 and 33. We know that there was pressure on early Christians not to confess Christ. You see that in John 9, 22, the Apostle Paul instructed Timothy to confess the faith. That's first Timothy 6, 12. The Apostle John called the churches of Asia Minor to confess the incarnation of Christ against the dualists who denied the incarnation. That's first John 4, 15, and second John 7. The confession of Christ and His truth is so important that it's something all believers will do at the last day. Paul says that in Philippians 2, 11. And we'll even be confessing the faith in heaven. That's Revelation 3, 5. So the church followed the biblical pattern by making creeds. What are creeds? Well, our word creed comes from the Latin word credo, I believe. The creed is typically a short statement of faith. The ecumenical creeds, including the Apostles creed, which was developed through the first 6th centuries or so of the early church. We'll come back to that. The nice scene and constant and appoliting creed. Nice, 325 and then elaborated at Constantinople in 381. The Athanasian creed sometime after 428 AD, 428. And the definition of Calcedon, which was adopted at AD 451, they've been widely accepted across the ages in the ecumenical creeds. The ancient church responded to some of the great heresies in or of or against the Christian religion. For example, in the nice scene, Constantinople and creed, the church defended the biblical doctrine that God the Son and the Spirit are of the same substance. They are consubstantial with the Father and with each other. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and then the 3rd Council of Toledo in 8589 added the so-called Philly-Oqua clause that says the Spirit also proceeds from the Son. And this revision has been received by the Lutheran and the Reformed. Churches, thus according to the nice scene Constantinople and creed as received by the churches, the Son and the Spirit are not merely like God, they are God. Yet though God is one in nature, He also exists in three distinct co-eternal persons who share equally in that one nature. Nowhere are the doctrines of the Trinity in the two natures of Christ more clearly taught than in the Athenation creed. The definition of calcidon teaches us how to keep Jesus' humanity and deity united in one person without confusing them. The Apostles creed serves as a summary of the consensus of the ancient church on the great doctrines of the Christian faith. These are boundary markers beyond which no Christian may safely go. As the Athenation creed says, "Whosoever will be saved before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic, that is universal faith." Confessions, what do we mean by confessions? Well, our noun confession comes from the Latin verb confidior to confess. The great Reformed confessions include the Belgium Confession from 1561, the Heidelberg Catechism, from 1563 and the Canons of Dord, which were completed and adopted in 1619. The Westminster Standards from 1648. As we've seen, the idea of creeds and confessions did not originate in church history. That is in the post-apastolic history of the church. We find them in scripture. Creeds and confessions are good. And as I say, they are unavoidable. Even our friends who reject creeds have one. The folks who say, "No creed but Christ have a creed. It's a very short creed. It's a very inadequate creed, but it is a creed." To say, "No creed but Christ is a creed." It's like saying everything is relative. It's one of these self-defeating statements. You're claiming everything is relative. Yes, but you're claiming that your statement that everything is relative is not relative. It's basically nonsense. So the question is not, as I say, whether we'll have a confession or a creed, but whether it will be biblical, whether it will be ecumenical, and whether it will be sound. One of the great concerns that animates resistance to creeds and confessions is the justifiable concern that human doctrines and traditions should not replace scripture. Amen. After all, the Protestant reformers said, "Sola, Scriptura," and they meant it. The sole magisterial, that is ruling authority of the Word of God, was the formal cause of the Protestant Reformation. And that's, of course, what we mean by the Latin slogan, "Sola, Scriptura," according to scripture alone. Where Rome confessed two streams of authority, church and scripture, the Protestant churches, the Lutheran and Reformed, recognized the supreme ruling authority of Scripture alone. To the church, they admitted only ministerial authority. Now, that's a real authority, but it is subordinate to Holy Scripture. The ecumenical creeds and the reformed confessions are expressions of that ministerial authority. By definition, ministerial authority is serving authority. Magisterial authority is ruling authority. Only Scripture has magisterial authority. The confessions of the creeds are ecclesiastically sanctioned summaries of God's Word, where the church has applied God's Word, interpreted God's Word, and spoke to specific issues. And should those creeds and confessions be found to be in need of correction, to be made more faithful to God's Word, they may indeed, in due process, or after due process, be revised. In fact, they have been revised. In the confessions themselves, the church declares that no other authority can rival God's Word. In article seven of the Belgian confession from 1561, the reformed church is declared, the Holy Scriptures fully contain the will of God, and that everything that one quoting again ought to believe unto salvation is sufficiently taught therein. From the Scriptures, we learn again quoting the whole manner of worship. And Scripture alone is so authoritative that it is, again quoting, unwaful for anyone, we say, whether an apostle or an angel to contradict it, merely human writings, no matter how highly regarded or ancient cannot be of, again, quoting, equal value with, close quote there. Scripture, which alone is the invaluable rule for the Christian faith and the Christian life. It's true that there are churches and even entire denominations that have relegated the ecumenical creeds and reformed confessions to the museum or to the dustbin. And we think particularly of the mainline denominations, the seven sisters of the mainline. In such cases, the fault lies not with the creeds and confessions, but with the infidelity, again, of the mainline churches. For those congregations and denominations that still believe God's Word, as it was understood in the ancient church and in the reformation, the creeds and confessions are the living voice of the church's understanding of God's Word on the most important issues of Christian teaching and Christian living. Hi, it's the voice here to help you navigate all the Heidelcast resources. Did you know that since 2009, the Heidelcast has completed not three, not four, but five. That's right. Five complete series. I did not know that it's true. There is a series on the Doctor of God. I am that I am a series on covenant theology and baptism. I will be a God to you and to your children, a series on the moral law of God. God's holy law, a series on knownism, antinomianism and the barrel of modern divinity, a series on eschatology and first Peter as it was in the days of Noah. That was weird, wild stuff. Not really. It's just confessional reformed theology, piety and practice. We're talking about practice. We are and you'll find all those series at heidelblog.net/resources. When you do, don't forget, when the client in the coffer clings, the cost of bandwidth triggered. The post-apostolic church almost immediately after the close of the canon began confessing the substance of what later would come to be known as the Apostles Creed. It was called the Rule of Faith, or Regula Fidei. Ignatius of Antioch, who was the leading pastor and Antioch was probably martyred in Rome in the very early second century, did not use the expression rule of faith, but he taught explicitly several of the articles of what we know as the rule of faith and then as the Apostles Creed. In about AD 170, we see Irenaeus, the leading pastor in León, perhaps the greatest of the second century theologians and defenders of the faith, articulating most of the articles of what Tertullian would in the third century call the Rule of Faith, again which we know as the Apostles Creed. In against heresies, 1101, Irenaeus was already expressing the essence of the rule of faith or the Apostles Creed. Here's a quotation. The church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples this faith. In one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and the sea at all things that are in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the administration of God, and the advance, and the birth from a virgin and the suffering, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and his manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father to gather all things in one, and to raise up a new, all flesh of the whole human race, in order to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Savior, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father. Every knee should bow of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess to Him that He should execute just judgment towards all, and that He may send spiritual wickedness and the angels who transgressed, and became apostates, together with the ungodly and the unrighteous and the wicked, and the profane among us, into everlasting fire. But may in the exercise of His grace confer immortality on the righteous and holy, and those who have kept His commandments, and have persevered in His love, some from the beginning and others from their repentance, and may surround them with everlasting glory. Well, you can hear the essence of, and almost all, of what will become the Apostle's Creed in about AD 170 here in Earnass, and it just struck me again reading this passage that He says, for example, that all the apostates and all the unbelievers, the repubates, they're all going to everlasting judgment of fire. If you ever heard someone say that well, the doctrine of hell, that's a medieval development. Well, here's Earnayas teaching the doctrine of eternal punishment a long time before the medieval church. So don't let people buffalo you when they say, well, the church just made up the doctrine of eternal punishment. It's a medieval myth. No, it's part of the ecumenical faith that we find in Earnayas in AD 170, and that's just one of three such passages in Earnayas. Again, He sketched the rule of faith in against heresies 3, 4, 2. I won't read it for you. It's not as long as the first one, but it says the same stuff. And by the way, in the two earliest forms of what would become the Apostle's Creed here in Earnayas, you ought to notice that there is nothing in them about Jesus going to the place of the dead, the descended, the descent of Christ to the dead or the dead once. We'll come back to that, but just make a mental note of that. And then a third time in against heresies in 4337 Earnayas wrote, he has a full faith in one God Almighty of whom are all things, and in the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, by whom all are all things, and in the administrations or the economies connected with Him by means of which the Son of God became man, and a firm belief in the Spirit of God who furnishes us with a knowledge of the truth, and has set forth the economies of the Father and the Son, in virtue of which he dwells with every generation of men according to the will of the Father. Clemente of Alexandria, who died about 80-215, and Tertullian who died in Carthage, in what is today Tunisia in the early 3rd century, both spoke explicitly of the rule of faith, the regular Fidei, at least as Tertullian would put it in Latin. Tertullian, in his treatise on the veiling of virgins, wrote, the rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one alone, immovable and irreformable, the rule to which of believing in one only God omnipotent, the creator of the universe, and his Son, Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary. You see how often that comes up in these early versions of what will become the Apostles Creed, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised again the third day from the dead, received in the heavens, sitting now at the right hand of the Father, destined to come to judge the quick and the dead quick simply. means living through the resurrection of the flesh as well. So here we are in the early 200s, the early 3rd century, and the rule of faith is sounding very much like what we know as the Apostles Creed. Again, if you listened, you didn't hear the phrase descended into hell because it wasn't present. Again, we'll come back to that. One more thing, as I was just pointing out, have you noticed how often the born of a virgin has appeared already in the rule of faith that appears all three times in Irenaeus and Tertullian just used it. So the virgin conception by the Holy Spirit of the humanity of Christ is part of the undoubted ecumenical faith. And so when the liberals and the mainline denominations, the seven sisters of the mainline in the USA, when they dispense with the virgin birth, they are dispensing with ecumenical Christianity. One of Tertullian's early major works was against an early Unitarian by the name of Praxius. And in his treatise against Praxius, chapter 2, Tertullian again confessed again by explicitly the regular Fidei, the rule of faith, quoting here. We however, as indeed, always have done, and more especially since we have been better instructed by the paraclete who leads men into all truth, believe that there is only one God. But under the following economy, as it is called, that this one, only God, also has a son, his word, who proceeded from himself by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. Him, we believe, to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and have been born of her being both man and God, the Son of man and the Son of God, and have been called by the name of Jesus Christ. We believe him to have suffered, died, and to have been buried according to the scriptures, and after he had been raised again by the Father, and taken back to heaven, to be sitting at the right hand of the Father, and that he will come to judge the quick and the dead, who sent from heaven, from the Father, according to his own promise, the Holy Spirit, the paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. He goes on to say that this rule of faith has come down from the early church, quoting here, from the beginning of the gospel, close quote. In his prescription against Heretics, chapter 13, Tertullian gave the most complete form of the rule of faith. And again, I won't, for the sake of time, read the whole thing because it's fairly long, but suffice it to say that it is essentially identical to what becomes, or what we know, as the apostles creed. And so let's turn now to the apostles creed. First, the apostles themselves did not write the creed. We might just as well refer to it as the apostolic creed because it is a summary of the teaching of the apostles, or we could just use the very ancient phrase, as I've been using here, the rule of faith, which should be a fine thing to say. The medieval view that there are twelve articles and that each one was written by an apostle simply isn't true. The apostles creed didn't come into the form that we know it until decades after the last apostle, the apostle John, went to be with the Lord. The apostles creed is just the more mature version of the rule of faith, but they are essentially identical, which means that the apostles creed has obviously roots in Scripture, but it has roots in the history of the church that go back to as early as AD170. And actually we can go earlier than that. I didn't walk you through the details, but you can find most of or several of the articles of what will become the rule of faith and then the apostles creed in Ignatius of Antioch, which takes us back to possibly its early as AD107, or sometimes people say about AD115, but very very early in the second century. So just after the turn of the second century, the early 100s, already we have the core of the rule of faith, and then a more elaborate articulation of it in the AD170s. And of course, we can easily imagine that these articles were already being articulated before Irenaeus, but we have them expressly in Irenaeus in AD170 and then again in the early third century in Clemente of Alexandria and in Tertullian. And we've looked at that. So before the three forties, and be the early fourth century, just before the mid-fourth century, the apostles creed was just about fully formed. I believe in God the Father Almighty, while we were confessing in the three forties. And I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried. The third day he was raised from the dead. He ascended into heaven at the right hand of the Father, from where he shall come to judge the living and the dead. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead. So if you're familiar with the apostles creed as we usually recite it, you'll notice that it's a little bit different, but it's very, very similar. Again, there's nothing in the creed here in the three forties, or just before the three forties, about the descent of Christ to the dead. That's because, according to the earliest commentator on the creed, that's Rufinus, who died about AD 401, the terms buried or buried and descended into hell were used interchangeably. That means they meant the same thing. So there's no doctrine in the ecumenical faith, or in the rule of faith, that says that Jesus went to the place of the dead. We simply are saying that Jesus died and was buried, was placed, his body was placed in a tomb. About AD 390 is the first use of the descended clause he descended in to hell, or the descent clause, AD 390. In other words, they meant the same thing. There were different ways of saying buried. Even over the next century, as the North African church, under the influence of Augustine, added a little bit to the creed. It's substantially unchanged. I'll read from the North African version of the creed from the four hundreds. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried. On the third day, he was raised from the dead. He ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father. Once he shall come, again, to judge the living in the dead, I believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy Catholic church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body. Here we are in the fifth century, and in the creed we do not have a doctrine of the descent of Christ to the place of the dead. But we do have the Trinity, the incarnation of God, the Son, the Virgin birth, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, His ascension, His bodily ascension, the Holy Spirit, the deity of the Holy Spirit, the church, the forgiveness of sins, and the bodily resurrection. By the time we get to the mid-seventh century, the text as it emerges from what we might call the early Gregorian period in the wake of Gregory I said, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, and buried." By the way, it's dead and not died. It refers to an outcome and not a process. He descended into hell, and there it is. The third day he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. By the way, whence means from where, so we don't need to say both. Anyway, just whence. Whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life eternal. Amen. You can hear the places where the church has elaborated on the creed to born of the Spirit and the Virgin, the church, I think, helpfully, added, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, to the clause crucified under Pontius Pilate, the church, added, suffered. The most substantive change, of course, was the addition of the discended. He descended after buried. So now you have not two terms that mean the same thing, but now they are being used sequentially to suggest that not only was Jesus crucified, dead, and buried, but then he also went to the place of the dead. By the early 7th century, the church had come to using them sequentially, and as you can tell here, this is a rather late development. Well, what should you take away from this episode? A Christian must believe, as we say in the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 22, all that is promised us in the gospel. Well, what's that? We go on to say which the articles of our Catholic undoubted Christian faith teach us in some. This means that there is an undoubted holy Christian faith, an ecumenical faith, a universal faith. It's grounded in Scripture. It's imitating Scripture. It's drawn from Scripture. It's drawing inferences from Scripture, and it's done by the church as she's prayerfully and carefully reflecting on Scripture, responding to the challenges that she has faced. And it's ancient. We've seen that we begin to see the rule of faith emerge in the very earliest second century, and it takes shape through the second and third century, so that by the early part of the third century, we have, and really before that, 40 years before that, by in the 80170s, we have the essence, and almost all of what will become the apostles' creed. So the ecumenical faith is a truly ancient faith, and it's ecumenical in as much as it is shared by all Christians and churches and traditions in all times and in all places. Stay tuned in our next episode, we'll begin looking at just these things. "The story you have just heard was true, only the names were changed to protect the innocent." That's it from episode 183. Join us next time for another thrilling episode of the Heidelcast. As we continue the series, what must to Christim be left? Don't miss an episode, subscribe at HeidelBlog.net, in Apple podcasts, or any podcast app. Email [email protected]. Call the Heidel phone anytime at 760-618-1563-760-618-1563, or send a voice memo to [email protected], send or leave a message, and we may use it in a future podcast. Remember, the Heidelcast may be cheap, but it isn't free. When the coin and the copper clinks, the cost of bandwidth shrinks. Copyright 2021, all rights reserved. This is a Heidel media production. All right, that's it. Let's roll. Hey, let's be careful.