Credo 1 – We believe …

The Creed is a lovesong. In it we praise the one we love for his qualities and for the things he has done. The Creed is a lovesong in praise of the Trinity as we recall in turn the attributes and actions that we appropriate to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Everything done by God is done by the whole Trinity: yet there is something appropriate in assigning the work of creation to the Father, the work of salvation to the Son, and the work of sanctification to the Holy Spirit.

Most of what we know we believe. There is little enough that any of us knows ‘scientifically’, i.e. through personal experience and experiment. For the most part we accept the word of reliable experts and authorities and we do it in all areas of life. There is nothing unreasonable about it: in fact it seems eminently reasonable that we should accept the word of trustworthy authorities.

Faith in the theological sense has something in common with belief in this more ordinary sense but it is also distinctively different. This is because the trustworthy authority in question is God. This makes our theological faith at once more mysterious (because God and everything to do with God is mysterious) and more certain (for what authority is more trustworthy than God). The great theologians were well aware of this two-sided character of faith, that it is at once fragile, because it is a kind of dark knowledge, and strong, because although it is a feeble hold on truth (from our point of view) the truth on which it is a feeble hold is God who is Truth itself.

So we believe people. I believe my friend when she tells me that something has happened, because she is a sane and reliable person and I have no reason to doubt her word. We also believe things. I believe that there is a God, for example, and that Jesus Christ has through his death saved all humanity. These are not just opinions: to believe such things means to commit ourselves to their being true even though we don’t have the clinching evidence for this that our minds would prefer to have. And we believe in people. Augustine makes much of this sense of faith and Aquinas follows him. They break up the Latin word credere to mean cor dare, to give one’s heart. When people marry this is the kind of faith that enables them to make the commitment involved. It is faith in this sense that allows us to recite the Creed as a lovesong. To say ‘we believe’ then means ‘we give our hearts to God the Father, creator … to God the Son, redeemer … to God the Holy Spirit, giver of life …’

I asked a wise Dominican once whether I could know that I had the faith. He said, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘no, it is part of faith itself, part of the same mystery: you can only believe that you believe’. I suppose to claim anything more would be idolatrous and it is why ‘fundamentalist’ believing unsettles people – it forgets that faith is not so much my hold on God’s truth as it is the hold of God’s truth on me – humanly fragile, infinitely powerful.