Apostles’ Creed (part 8)

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On May 11, Mother’s Day, I conclude my series at the Highland Church of Christ. On this day, I remember my mother, who died in 2024. I also remember my father. May 11 is his birthday. He died in 2018. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord (Rev. 14:13). If we have died with Christ, we shall also live with him (Rom. 6:8).

The resurrection of the body. // And the life everlasting. Amen.

    • The Creed ends with the fullness of our future salvation. It is “consistently pictured as a time when justice and peace will be finally established, the high and mighty brought low, and the lowly lifted up.”[1]
    • That which is true of Jesus is true for us. The telos of his life on earth is our telos too.
    • “Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. In other words, ‘entering’ the kingdom is a matter of entering into God’s sovereign rule, submitting to that rule, and seeing it played out in the word in which we live, whether that is now, already, or in some presumed future lying beyond death.”[2] It is picture not as a place we go but a life and future that which comes to us, on earth, a place where God will himself fully be at home in his creation. Bringing God’s glorious purpose of creation to its fulfilment.
    • “In the degree to which Christianity cut itself off from its Hebrew roots and acquired Hellenistic and Roman form, it lost its eschatological hope and surrendered its apocalyptic alternative to ‘this world’ of violence and death. It merged into late antiquity’s gnostic religion of redemption. … God’s eternity now took the place of God’s future, heaven replaced the coming kingdom, the spirit that redeems the soul from the body supplanted the Spirit as ‘the well of life,’ the immortality of the soul displaced the resurrection of the body, and yearning for another world became a substitute for changing this one.”[3]
    • “Have we become terrified of dying? We do all in our power, it seems, to glorify youth and avoid death. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. If we have died with Christ, we shall also live with him. We commemorate the saints, not on the day of their birth, but rather on the day of their death. Our coming into the world matters far less than our going from it—our passage into eternal life. In our death, our lives are meant to reach their completion and fulfillment in Christ.”[4]
      • Some say, “there is no resurrection of the dead (anastasis nekron)” (1 Cor. 15:12): no raising of corpses. 1 Cor. 15 is a response. No! Paul says, we believe in the resurrection.
        • When we speak of believing in the resurrection of the body, the question is asked, “How can there be both continuity and transformation?”
        • 1 Cor. 15:50 “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” The resurrection involves both the continuity with our present embodied existence and the transformation of our bodies into a glorified state beyond our imagining (1 Cor. 15:52).
      • And just as in 1 Cor. 15, it involves the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:23).
      • See earlier posts about the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
    • Life everlasting = eternal life or quality of life, fullness of life (John 10:10; 11:25–26).
      • Not “wishful thinking” or “too good to be true.”
      • “So Luther’s wise counsel: ‘As little children in their womb know about their birth, so little do we know about life everlasting.’”[5]
      • 1 Jn. 3:2.
      • The eternal quality of love.
  1. “Amen.” “So it is strange that we end the creed by pronouncing a solemn ‘amen.; To say amen to the creed is to sign my mane to it. I confirm the truth of this: I authorize it: amen. Yet we barely fathom what we are saying in the creed. How could anyone have the power to say amen to all this?”[6]
    • Or do we wink or cross our fingers on certain lines of the creed?
    • 2 Cor 1:18–20. “The whole creed is about God’s action God’s agency, God’s initiative. Even at the end, when we pronounce the amen, we are drawing not on our own resource but God’s. We are participating in the action of Jesus, who looks into the face of God and sees all God’s ways and works, and says: ‘Yes! Amen!’ When we say the creed, we echo his might and eternal amen with our own small hopeful voices.”[7]
    • If the Creed is performative, then how does it shape and form us (individually and/or communally)? Over time, what transformative action do we see in our lives? What is promised? What is fulfilled?

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you (2 Cor 13:13).

[1] Hart, Confessing and Believing, 276.

[2] Hart, Confessing and Believing, 279.

[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Trans. Margaret Kohl, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 306.

[4] Ralph C. Wood, “The Call of the Crucified,” 111, in Van Harn, Exploring & Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed.

[5] Quoted by Gabriel Fackre, “The Life Everlasting,” 280, in Van Harn, Exploring & Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed.

[6] Myers, The Apostles’ Creed, 131.

[7] Myers, The Apostles’ Creed, 132.