Apostles’ Creed for Everyone
(A translation by Jim Rigby)
Every religion is a particular expression of the universal human experience. The original word for “creed” in Greek meant “symbol.” When the original mystical religion we now call “Christianity” was translated into Latin, it fell from a religion of awareness to a dogmatic sect that unnecessarily divided people. What follows is a translation of the Apostles’ Creed based getting back to ways the Greek symbols might call us to our common life with others.
To be Christian means to accept Jesus as one’s model for what it means to be a human in the cosmos. There is no reason why we who have chosen Christianity as our path cannot sing our hymn in harmony with those who use a different particular symbol to open to the universal. It is not possible to obey Jesus’ command to be a good neighbor with all if our hymn to life is, itself, partisan.
This translation is a work in progress, so feel free to take a stab at saying it in a way that is better for you. Can a Jewish, Muslim or atheistic person find a way of singing the hymn in their own key? Surely, each path will say things that sound very different from the Christian version. My hope (impossible though it may be) is to affirm the central hymn of Christianity in a particular way that calls us a Christian community to our common experience with every other human, believers and skeptics alike. Surely we can all find a way through our own particular expression, to affirm something we all know is bigger than any of us.
I trust in the source, parent of all being, ultimate power, creative principle of all that is,
And in the human one, our guide, a unique manifestation of the source,
Conceived by the spirit of love, born of faithfulness,
suffered under political oppression, was executed, died and buried,
Descending to the very depths of nonbeing; on the third day was
found alive again in human solidarity: rising to the highest, perfectly
at one with the source, thereafter, became a standard for living and dying.
I trust in the spirit of life, the universality of faithfulness, the unity of
all who are kind and just,
that no mistake is final, that love does not die with the body, and that
life itself is eternal.
Jim,
I think you did an amazing job of reworking the Apostle’s Creed. When I leave it in the context of that creed, it’s not too hard to make sense of it, but, when I step back from it, leaving the original creed out of the picture, and, hence, the constraints that that creed applied to what you wrote, most of what you wrote suddenly appears to me to be a sort of mumbo jumbo nonsense that has little to do with anything, even maybe your own spiritual life and real beliefs, except maybe for the very last section. I guess it becomes that way to me because it disengages from the history that anchors the original creed by leaving out names, for example. If I knew nothing of Christianity and the Gospels and the Creed from which this was taken, what would this really tell me about your religious life and experience?
Do you see God as a parent in any sense more than something out of which things come, and is that really enough to apply such a loaded term as parent to it? Do you really trust in a human one that descended to nothingness and was discovered again after 3 days? What is this faithfulness and nothingness and what does they have to do with anything. In what sense was this human one so unique that you now trust in him/her? I’m not asking for expansion and definitions and all that. I’m asking whether this makes any real sense in the first place even to you outside the context of trying to refurbish a creed that probably hardly resembles anything you may really believe in the first place. Do the details you had to address from that creed really mean anything in your spiritual life? 5/1/14, 10:57 CDT
5/1/14, 10:39 CDT
Bob, it is a translation of the Apostle’s Creed. It is intended to be understood in that context. I’ve done several sermon series to unpack what is meant by each verse. I agree this creed or any creed is nonsense if lifted out of its context as a conversation within a faith community.
Jim,
Thanks. I thought you’d forgotten this blog for awhile. I recall an interesting series on NPR a few years ago in which, over the course of a few months, they read the “creeds” submitted by many people to a project called “This I Believe.” Those usually made sense, and most did not come from a faith community. At the time, I would not have agreed with any of them for myself, though most had some elements I liked.
The question I pose is whether the result of “translating” an ancient creed ends up making any sense to anyone other than the one(s) making the translation, and, even then, the constraints of the text being translated may not yield a product that the translator(s) themselves would say represents their real beliefs or creed. It may only represent a less disagreeable creed than the original for them, and, if they have been diligent in their scholarship, a better understanding of the original and how it might relate to them or maybe really not relate well to them very well at all.
I have followed your sermons series on this with much interest. As I said in introducing my original comment on this, I think you’ve done an amazing job of laying out an alternative expression of it and, I’ll add here, elaborating your thoughts on it in your series. I was a little disappointed that your SS class decided last week that they’d rather move on to something else.
My questions above are not intended to be hostile, but there are concerns in them. The questions are intended to seek a clearer focus on purpose and utility of product.
I might also wonder how the translation might affect the faith community that rallies around the original and that in which the translation is being born? Is more clarity or unity likely to result, for example, among them?
I realize, as I write this, that, perhaps, I keep forgetting that an important point you are making is that the creeds, to be really meaningful, should not be concretely clear but should weave a rich tapestry of possibilities that capture our creative spirits and bring each of us to our core in some profound way, as we contemplate them. 5/13/14, 21:51 CDT
Bob, I think you raise excellent points and I believe whether something like the Apostles’ Creed can be saved is a living question. My belief is the only way to do so is to reframe them from dogmatic assertions of belief to cosmic hymns. I am contending that they originally were understood in this sense which is why I translated them from the Latin back into the Greek and then into English. I agree with anyone who says they are not good translations of the Latin, but I would also contend that the Latin “creed” does not do justice to the rich possibilities of the Greek “symbol.”
Jim,
Thanks. I’m wondering whether these original creeds were really understood as “cosmic hymns” in the sense you mean that, though. They seem to have been more aimed at concretizing and clarifying certain ideas and rebutting other ideas with which they did not agree. 5/14/14, 08:06 CDT