What We Believe

Understanding and Confessing the Apostles' Creed

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781493400195
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What do Christians believe about God the Father, Jesus Christ, the church, salvation, eternal life, and more? This contemporary classic from theologian R. C. Sproul provides a matchless introduction to the basics of the Christian faith.

1
Confess or Profess?

I believe . . .

When a person embraces the Christian faith and says with assurance, “I believe . . . ,” that person has truly embarked upon life.

The Bible describes that life as new:

• “I will put a new spirit in the people,” God tells Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 11:19).
• To stand before God, Jesus explains, you must be “born again” (John 3:7).
• The apostle Paul describes it as “a new creation.”1

This newness is more than just a software update. Jesus looks us squarely in the eye in John 3 and says, “So, you think you learned what newness means when you held your first baby? That little bundle of life gave you just a glimpse of what a spiritual birth means.”

Equipped with newness, a baby in Christ begins a life journey with the words “I believe. . . .” It is a pilgrimage, an adventure with both surprises and pitfalls. Moments of pain, doubt, and confusion rear up to discourage. The Christian life is nothing if not challenging. It is not the fun life, nor the easy life.

It is life.

This book is about living that life to the fullest, about renewing your mind so that your thinking conforms to the mind of Christ. Our spiritual creation in Christ inaugurates an intellectual and emotional creation, but does not complete it. Some old thought patterns and philosophical assumptions remain. To deal with those we need to move our metaphor of the Christian life from the nursery to boot camp. Now comes basic training in righteousness, the hard work of truth calisthenics to develop strong, disciplined faith muscles.

Fortified Faith for a Hostile World

Some companies set up a gym or weight room, build a running track, or offer employees membership in a health club. Physical well-being contributes to mental and emotional health and makes for a happier, more productive employee. God pioneered on-the-job fitness training for building up the Christian. Faith must be lived in the context of a world of unbelief. So that world is where the Christian works out. It is a difficult regimen, but an easier training camp would not push the Christian beyond the limits of self-sufficiency. The duress of living in the midst of a hostile world tests and proves what is genuine. Nothing contrived will stand.

I believe.

The setting for living and learning “I believe . . .” faith today is interesting, if difficult. Briefly searching Google for terms such as faith or spirituality will return a host of different websites, each espousing its own system of belief. A number of years ago, a Time-CNN poll found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in the healing power of personal prayer, while 77 percent thought that God sometimes intervenes to cure serious illness. On the same page of Time on which that high view of prayer was reported, film producer Marty Kaplan testified to his own journey from Judaism to atheism and back again. Whether or not it was the editors’ intent, Kaplan’s statement of faith gave perspective to the survey results:

The God I have found is common to Moses and Muhammad, to Buddha and Jesus. It is known to every mystic tradition. In mine, it is the Tetragrammaton, the Name so holy that those who know it dare not say it. It is what the Cabala calls Ayin, Nothingness, No-Thingness. It is Spirit, Being, the All. I used to think of psychic phenomena as New Age flim-flam. I used to think of reincarnation as a myth. I used to think the soul was a metaphor. Now I know there is a God—my God, in here, demanding not faith but experience, an inexhaustible wonder at the richness of this very moment.2

Computer Chip Faith

Whereas many adopt Kaplan’s all-gods-are-my-god creed, not all are so satisfied with that eclectic theology. The current ambivalence toward faith has a history. During the roaringest of decades, the 1920s, mainstream America wanted to be seen sitting in church on Sunday mornings. The 1950s marked the end of a benevolent era of white, Protestant, upper-middle-class moral tranquility, symbolized by the Eisenhower image.

Religiosity without substance crumbled beneath the upheaval and revolutions of the 1960s. The philosophy of Nietzsche and nihilism replaced morally bankrupt pseudo-faith. The 1960s generation of young adults was the product of 250 years of Enlightenment devotion to the mind, a century of skeptical Christianity, and a childhood centered in materialism mixed with fear of cold war nuclear disaster. Many rejected it all: “Enough pretense. I will make my own way bravely through a world in which God is irrelevant and life is hopeless. There is no truth beyond my truth now. Let’s turn on to marijuana and drop out of social convention.”

These first shock waves overtured an invasive earthquake of values and ideals in the 1970s. While the flower children were drifting into adulthood’s realities and many returned to faith of one sort or another, their children were ill-equipped to believe in, or to take responsibility for, anything. God’s irrelevance was joined by the nuclear family’s predicted demise.

As the larger world seemed bent on self-destruction in the 1980s, Westerners turned cynical, isolationist, and self-absorbed. The idealist 1960s had become the materialist 1980s. Who was really shocked when financial and sexual scandals rocked high-profile religion? “Everybody’s got an angle. Nobody really believes that stuff anymore.” In God’s providence, world power structures in the Middle East and Eastern Europe picked this moment to collapse. People all over the world hungered for faith with content, an answer to irrationality.

In this new millennium, Kaplan speaks for those turned off by religions, skeptical about truth-claims, fearful without faith, and hungry for hope. The religion of the decade seems to be found in technology and revivals of mysticism—the celebration of irrationality in search of “inexhaustible wonder,” momentary virtual reality. Today practically every religion is respected and approved—except religion that speaks of absolute truth and narrow roads of obedience. Unfortunately, the rise of Islamic terrorism has only increased our culture’s distaste for absolute truth claims. In any case, the days of sentimental faith are over. A foreboding atmosphere hovers over culture. In this atmosphere, humanity looks to the future, not with breathless anticipation and enthusiasm, but with a sense of helplessness. What is needed is Christian faith—solid truth to face the future. But content-filled truth is the only kind of truth that is utterly rejected. It is almost as if Paul had time-warped to the faith and morality of our society when he wrote Romans 1:22–24:

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.

Meeting of the Mind, Will, and Emotions

In this day, belief with conviction is regarded as both dangerous bigotry and a fanciful flight into make-believe. The first charge, that believers are soul terrorists, will be addressed when we consider whether many flavors of truth can coexist. The second needs a response in defense of “I believe . . .” faith. Is faith merely a leap into the absurd, a flight from reality, an exercise in outmoded religion? Some Christians teach and live as if it is. But the authentic confession, “I believe . . . ,” repudiates the absurd and the occult. Biblical Christianity knows nothing of blind leaps. Blindness, in biblical categories, marks the unbelieving mind. Faith in the New Testament sense begins as a thinking response to a divine summons and activity.

The New Testament picture of faith breaks out three dimensions as critical in distinguishing true Christian confession from other varieties of faith. These are the three dimensions to renewing your mind through faith: (1) faith has an intellectual dimension; (2) faith touches the human will profoundly; (3) faith is intimately bound to our emotions.

Faith and the Mind

History’s Kaplans have always proclaimed faith to be basically nonrational, an affair of the heart but not of the mind. Around AD 200, an influential Christian teacher named Tertullian propounded the idea that it is noble to believe something that is absurd. In fact, a certain courage is required to reject what everyone else considers rational and to believe what seems absurd, but anyone who follows absurdity very far has more valor than discretion. Tertullian is like contemporary thinkers who call us to blind faith in the midst of meaninglessness. Yet this noble faith is far removed from what the Bible describes. Here is no invitation to embrace contradiction. Certainly we do have to believe propositions we don’t always totally understand. But the same is true of all modern life. Otherwise, most of us couldn’t use the sophisticated gadgetry that technology now provides. In the realm of the supernatural, mysteries that stretch far beyond the reach of the mind are hinted at in creation and described in Scripture. But such mysteries are coherent and mutually compatible. If God seems to be calling evil good or green red, we had better study further to see what we have wrong. Incoherence is never the mark of God. We become confused; God’s Holy Spirit does not.

This distinctive of the Christian faith is crucial. Valid truth is the faith to bear us through a crisis. We need not clench our fists, grit our teeth, and believe something is irrational in order to salve over our feelings of hopelessness. The Christian draws faith muscle from Jesus’s rational proposition and comfort:

In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world (John 16:33b).

Jesus makes an absolute truth-claim: “I have overcome the world.” As we learn to trust that claim as truth and grasp the fullness of what Jesus means, we strengthen our belief muscles. We can actually participate in Christ’s victory. It would be irrational not to take heart.

To say that faith is reasonable is not to confuse faith with rationalism. Rationalism emphasizes the mind’s ability to understand all reality without help. A young wife lies in an intensive care unit and must be told that her husband and child did not survive the car accident. Sharing her grief, we can only admit our incomprehension and say, “God, we don’t understand, but we accept that you do understand and are trustworthy.”

It is at this point that Kaplan’s belief in relative truth seems most dissatisfying. Truth is truth, whether it ever touches my understanding. Even if I don’t understand the truth or know what it is, why should I mystically trust both Buddha and Jesus? They are saying diametrically opposed things; they cannot both be true. I much prefer the path of understanding, imperfect as it is, so that true truth is able to touch my life.

Because faith does not exist in a vacuum of understanding, Christians need creedal statements that summarize the connection between thinking and acting faith. The Christian confessing the Apostles’ Creed begins with the statement “I believe.” Then the believer goes on to summarize in broad strokes the extent of that belief. The Holy Spirit does not call us to faith in general, but to faith in particular—to faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

If, as Romans 3:20–28 and other passages teach, a person is justified by faith alone, this question of understanding is vital. Christian leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation understood this. They carefully defined what is needed for faith to be saving faith, for faith in Jesus to be declared righteousness before God: content, intellectual assent, and personal trust.

Content is the information communicated by the Bible. This content includes the facts that God exists, that he entered history in the God-man Jesus Christ, and that in Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension we have eternal life. To be a believer one must understand who Jesus is and what he is all about.

A believer must not only be aware of the content, however, but must also give intellectual assent. To be a Christian, I must know that Jesus died on the cross and then believe that his act is sufficient to pay the penalty for my sins and bridge the chasm between me and the Father. My mind must regard as true the content of the faith if I am to be truly a believer. That brings us to the central issue of trust.

Faith and the Will

What if I have all the content straight and clearly understand it in my mind and am willing to acknowledge that all of this is indeed true? Does that give me saving faith? Not according to the Bible. Luke records that the first beings to recognize the true identity of Jesus were not faithful disciples. Demons penetrated his disguise and recognized instantly that he was the Son of the most high God.3 Although they recognize the truth about God, they hate that truth. The apostle James uses this point to distinguish between dead faith and vital faith. Here sarcasm drips from the apostle’s pen:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? (James 2:19–20)

To give intellectual assent to the things of God only elevates a person from the status of pagan to the level of the demon. It advances the soul not a centimeter into the kingdom of God. Satan assents to the facts, but does not possess saving faith. The New Testament teaches that the individual must act upon the content.

If this were an open dialogue among divergent Christian theologies, a number of hands would by now be raised in an effort to get the floor. The representatives of one group would say that our formulation of will and faith slides much too far to the side of will. “Don’t you know that the will has nothing to do with faith? No one comes to Christ in true belief unless compelled by the Holy Spirit.” The second part of the statement is true: A sinful human being is every bit as much a rebel against Christ as a demon. We shall see later why the hardened heart requires a supernatural work of God to be able to confess with a willing heart, “I believe.” On the other hand, a willing heart is, in fact, willing. Believing and obeying are acts in which I take part. I am willing or salvation never happens. God intervenes or I am never willing.

Activist Christians will next raise their voices to tell me that I am missing an important point. Their slogan is that “Faith is a verb, not a noun.” “It is more important to do faith through loving God and serving others than to cogitate in a theological ivory tower and formulate creeds.”

Once again, partly true. For faith to be real, I must apply my faith to my personal situation. But do not be led into a false dichotomy: The Bible welds my acts of obedience to the content of my confession. A multitude of churches and individual believers have been drawn by this polarity to do great acts of charity while teaching a little god that is totally foreign to the God of Scripture. Some have gone so far as t...