As I have spoken in my article upon Creeds only of two, it may be supposed by the reader that I have some reason for objecting to the third. Had I felt such objections I should have stated them openly, and not left them to be discovered by inference. There would be little courage in acknowledging them. The number of those who reject this Creed may not be so great as it was in the last century, but it is still large, and composed of persons respectable for their learning, their piety, and their influence. Those who are most strong in defending it will find so much fault with my opinions on other subjects, that I should not be at all likely to conciliate them by professing an agreement with them upon this.
I omitted to speak of the Athanasian Creed, merely because it did not concern the subject I was treating of. Its formula is not, ‘I believe,’ but ‘Quicunque vult.’ It has never been connected with Baptism. It has never been used except as an occasional service in any Church; its antiquity, though venerable, is certainly below that of the others. Evidently, therefore, its merits or its defects stand upon a different ground from theirs. I will now endeavour to explain why the ordinary objections to it seem to me of little weight, and wherein I believe its value consists.
The complaints against this Creed are chiefly two. 1. That it is not consistent with the Nicene, which asserts so clearly the idea of filial subordination. 2. That it is at direct variance with the command, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ If I believed either of the allegations to be true, the authority of no Church upon earth could induce me to use this formulary. But the more I have considered them, the less reason have I found in either of them.
1. The passage in the Athanasian Creed, which seems to some to interfere with the doctrine of the Nicene, is that in which it is affirmed, that Christ is equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching His Manhood. Here we are told, ‘it is signified, that the subordination of the Son to the Father is connected with His human nature. Whereas, according to the doctrine of the other Creed, which Bishop Bull has so finely developed, the subjection which was manifested in our Lord’s acts when upon earth was really involved in the very idea of His Being; that flesh which He took could not in any sense change the law of His existence, but was the medium through which it was shewn forth.’ I cannot doubt the truth of these remarks. The words, ‘Not I, but the Father,’ seem to me to be the key to the mystery of our Lord’s self-sacrifice, that is to say, of His innermost life; how, then, can I think them other than the expression of His own very Personality? But it is implied in what I have said that the fulness of the Godhead was in the man Christ, that He was the perfect God. The very objection which we are considering rests upon the ground that our Lord’s acts, as a man, would not be a complete exhibition of Himself, if we might regard them as only belonging to His assumed nature. But, if this be the case, -if we need to express two truths, one, the perfect and complete Godhead of our Lord; one, His subordination as a Son to the Father; each necessary to the other, each practically unmeaning without the other: -why may we not look at the union of humanity to the Divinity, as that which supplies us with the language for both? The idea of subordination, inequality, exists in the very nature of the Godhead; it is brought out and expressed through the inferiority of Manhood to Godhead. The Sonship of Christ is the type and ground of the relation in which the human stands to the divine. What then more complete and beautiful than the language of the Old Church upon this subject?
Do we not feel that if we had only the Nicene Creed—if a new heresy had not called forth another exposition—we should have been in great danger of losing our apprehension of a truth, from having but one imperfect form of language to unfold it in? Nay, do we not feel that as the Apostles’ Creed, without the Nicene, would lead us into the danger of thinking only concerning the relation in which the Divine Being stands to us; so the Nicene Creed without the Athanasian, would still lead us to think merely of divine relations, without remembering that there is an absolute ground visible in them and through them?
2. But the charge of uncharitableness is one which is far more popular and intelligible than that of which I have been speaking; perhaps, therefore, I may venture to meet it in a popular way. We are commonly asked such a question as this: ‘Though you may be able to explain away these clauses by ingenious sophisms in your study, do you not feel when you are reading the Creed in your Church to the people, that you are not uttering the kind of words which you would wish to utter, or acting in the kind of spirit in which you would wish to act, when you read the seventh chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, or the thirteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians?’ I can only answer this question for myself: but I doubt not there are hundreds who can say, with a perfectly clear conscience, what I say now. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, I never have felt tempted while reading this Creed, however I may have felt tempted at other times, to indulge one hard thought about the state of any man who is living now or has lived in former times. I do not think that the Creed calls upon me to do this: nay, I think that its awful language forbids me to do it. I dare not ask myself who has committed the fearful sin, of ‘confounding the Persons and dividing the Substance,’ which it denounces. It may not be the man who has used the most confused and heretical forms of expression; it may not be the man who has even seemed to the Church to be most self-willed and refractory; it may be the man who is resting most contentedly in his orthodoxy; it may be myself. Nay, have I not a witness within, that every wrong act which I have done, or wrong thought which I have cherished, so far as it has diminished my sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, has been of the nature of that sin which I describe by the words ‘Confounding the Persons,’ and has brought me into the danger of committing it; that every self-willed, unkind, schismatical act or thought has been of the nature of that sin which I describe by the words ‘Dividing the Substance,’ and has tended to bring me into it? For this Creed takes me into another region altogether from that of words and names and forms of the intellect, though it makes use of those words and names and forms, for the sake of correcting the abuses which they have produced, and as signs which may show me my way to deeper truths and principles. It is my own fault if I stay in the outer region, and do not let the Church guide me into its inner circle; it is my own fault if I do not warn others, and warn myself, of the connexion between eternal truths and principles, and that ‘doing good’ or ‘doing evil,’ to which, as the Creed declares in its last articles, eternal life or punishment are appended.
But why do I wish to retain this Creed, seeing that some may use it amiss for the condemnation of their neighbours, and not for good to them or to themselves? I answer, that if I parted with it I think I should not help the cause of charity, and should do great injury to the cause of truth. The language of the Old Church may sound stronger and fiercer than that which is common in our day, but it is grounded upon the words, ‘This is life eternal, that they may know Thee the only true God.’ The bottomless pit which the fathers really dreaded was that of Atheism, the state of the human spirit left without God. I believe the more we return to this idea the more of inward charity we shall have, the more we shall understand our glory and our perils, the more we shall have of common hopes and common objects; the more we shall be free from vulgar selfish desires, and from superstitious fears. I could not give up this Creed without saying, that the meaning and principle of it belonged less to this time than to former times. Whereas, I believe that they belong more to our time than to any time. For this, it seems to me, is the question which is in debate now. Are we to behold the unity which has its deepest and most real ground in that name of God which this Creed speaks of, informing all society and all nature; or are we to see everything broken, divided, unharmonised; a dark form of selflove, embodied in some visible tyranny, above us, and a gulf of utter nothingness beneath us?