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David Capes 

All right, we’ve got people listening to this podcast that are in every part of the world, and they may not use creeds in their church. Let’s start with a very basic question. What exactly is a creed? 

Michael Bird 

A creed is normally something that the ancient churches put down to express and define its faith. Both the content of their faith, but also the boundaries of their faith. We are the people who are committed to this articulation of the gospel, this story. We believe these truths about God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. The creeds put it down in a simple way that can be understood, can be learned, can be repeated in the context of worship, or also it can be utilized in the context of discipleship. 

David Capes 

You could use it as a platform for discipleship. I grew up in a tradition and people listening to this podcast may have and they say things like that, “no creed, but the Bible”. That statement assumes that you have a Bible. 

Michael Bird 

Yes, exactly. Or you have one translated into a language you can read, 

David Capes 

And that assumes you can read. Throughout much of the history of the church, people couldn’t read and there weren’t Bibles in every home. 

Michael Bird 

Yes, exactly. Before Bible apps, before the printing press, the main way people encountered scripture was through what they heard in church. They learned things they were taught early in their faith. Maybe they memorized Psalms and prayed elements like that. That’s why I get a little bit confused when people say the Bible is the center of our faith. Now, I’m a biblical scholar. I really do love me some Bible. I know you do too, David. But what was the center of people’s faith before the printing press? 

One of the main ways people learned Christian doctrine was, from their priest or pastor in their church, teaching them. Simple things by the prayers they prayed, being able to recite the Lord’s prayer or the Apostles Creed was the main foundational tools that people had when they wanted to understand who God was towards them. The Creed is like a portable theological syllabus you can take with you wherever you go. Wherever you can recite the Lord’s Prayer, you can begin thinking, praying, teaching and speaking about God, just by using the Apostles Creed as the template. 

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Now you’re an Anglican by confession, and you confess weekly, like other Anglicans, the Nicene Creed, which is longer. And you could write the same thing with the Nicene Creed, as you do with this, but it would be a longer book! 

Michael Bird 

Well, Anglicans are technically meant to say the Apostles Creed every day. We’re meant to say the Nicene Creed on Sunday, and I think we’re meant to say the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday. But that one’s very long. We don’t normally do that. But you’re right, the Nicene Creed does sound very similar to the Apostles Creed, but it’s longer. That was a creed that was based in a more polemical context, where the church was trying to figure out, who is Jesus in relation to God the Father. Is Jesus semi divine, miniature divine, or is he divine in the same way as God the Father? And it kicks off with the Creed of Nicaea in 325 AD and then climaxed when the Creed of Nicaea augmented or polished up a bit in 381 AD, in the first council of Constantinople. So, yes, that is very similar to the Apostles Creed, but it’s got a little bit more of a focus on the person of Jesus, God the Son, and a little bit more of a polemical rationale behind it as well. It’s saying, these are where the limits of the Christian faith are. 

David Capes 

I’ve always thought it’s kind of interesting because the Creed begins with something like pisteuo or credo. “I believe.” I believe. But it’s almost always “we”. We do that together. There are times that I would want to say, this is what we believe. We believe in God the Father. We believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Holy, apostolic, catholic Church. I have a little bit of a push back there. I wish we would say this together, as with what we believe. Because we have come to this faith together. We’ve not come to it in isolation. I didn’t arrive here on my own. I arrived here as a result of the ministry and the witness of thousands of people before I was ever born. 

Michael Bird 

Yes, and that’s the amazing thing. When you recite the Apostles Creed, you are joining a chorus, a communion of people around the world, right now. Think about it horizontally, but also then vertically. There are men and women well over a thousand years who have been reciting this creed as a statement of their unity in the one God. So it’s about, one LORD, one faith, one baptism, that we all share. And the symbol of that sharedness of our unity with each other is the way we recite the Apostles Creed. 

Another interesting fact is in a lot of churches, it’s customary to recite the Apostles Creed after the sermon. The logic there is, after you’ve heard the sermon from a teacher, it’s like now evaluate that against what it says in the creed. So, you go from the sermon to the Creed to remind you of what we’ve just heard but now think of it over and against the Apostles Creed. Hopefully the two are unified together. That provides, if you like, the immediate report card or the lens, the context in which you should remember and evaluate the sermon you’ve just heard. To ensure that you’re not just getting the ravings and strange, peculiar thoughts of some rando preacher! We now confess the Apostles Creed, because that is the context which we understand and evaluate the Word of God when it’s preached and presented to us. So that’s another interesting tradition. 

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We should give everybody cards, and they can hold up a card from 1-10. 

Michael Bird 

A scoring card, a scoring system. 

David Capes 

Yes, exactly but the Russian judge would always lower it several levels. You know how that goes with the Russian judge! 

Michael Bird 

Yeah, I know. I know 

David Capes 

One of the things you talk about here, is the idea of faith is fact. I think that’s the way you put it. And people today say you have facts or you’ve got faith and they’re not the same. And I love that little section where you talk about having faith based on fact. 

Michael Bird 

Faith is certainly far more than ascent to facts. There’s an element of trust. There’s an element of fidelity, even, dare I say, allegiance. But faith does include assenting to certain revealed truths about God. That God is Father, Jesus is Lord, the Holy Spirit is the promise of the Father. What faith does, and this is faith as articulating the content of what we believe, that’s an important element. In the ancient world, Christians were not unique by having important religious or theological beliefs. You can find that in Greco-Roman philosophy. You can find that in various cults, religions and popular practices in the ancient world. 

Where Christians were unique, is that they had an enthusiasm to police the boundaries of belief. That is where Christians were very, very unique.They don’t have theology. No, they did have a theology. They did have beliefs. You can read Cicero’s on the nature of the gods as a good example of debates about theology in the ancient world. But Christians really did want a certain degree of precision, particularly when it came to who God is and the relationship of God the Son to God the Father. And it was using belief as the boundary for what it means to behold, believe in God and follow the Lord Jesus Christ. So, faith as fact, was one of the more interesting and the more unique features of the first Christians. 

David Capes 

Yes, interesting. I really appreciated that section. One of the sections too, that I liked was the harrowing of Hades. That is a piece of the creed that some people would like to do without. You make a good argument that it’s important that we think about that, that we confess that, that we understand that as well. 

Michael Bird 

Yes, part of the problem is that our older English renderings of the Creed, now the Apostles Creed, is initially a Latin creed. A lot of early translation says that Jesus descended to hell, and people have found that problematic. Because hell is the place of eternal punishment for sinners who rebel against Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 5 – 

God. What would Jesus be doing there? You’ve also got the problem of whether hell actually exists yet. Because in the book of Revelation, it says, “Hades will be poured into the lake of fire”. You’ve got the idea that hell doesn’t exist [until in the future]. This is a future state for the wicked who remain resolute in their rebellion against God. So, people have always found that problematic. 

The problem goes back to the fact that there are different Latin words for a place in the afterlife. There is inferna and there is Infernum. If I can remember correctly, inferna refers to the waiting place of the dead like Hades, but Infernum refers to the place of everlasting judgment. We could say that there’s a distinction between Greek it would be Hades, the waiting place of the dead and Gehenna, which is hell, the place of everlasting judgment. That distinction got lost in the early Middle Ages, and some Latin manuscripts would interchange inferna and Infernum. So, there was a bit of a confusion that was introduced at at that point. 

People would say things like, Jesus descended to hell. What is far more likely and what is more in keeping with what we find in the New Testament and other creedal traditions about the church is to say that Jesus descended to Hades, or he descended to the place of the dead, and that also means we have to bring back Holy Saturday. Now we have good Friday, and the death of Jesus for our sins, and the atonement. We have the resurrection. But on Holy Saturday, Jesus participates in death. He goes down to Hades, experiences the full consequences of death in that way. And then leaves Hades, and comes back to life. 

And one area where the Christian tradition has really gone to town, in art, song, poetry, has been talking about what Jesus was doing in Hades and how he took everyone out of Hades, all the saints since Adam. He took them out of Hades and took them up to heaven with Him. So, it’s been a whole tradition discussing that. When Christ descends from Hades into the resurrection and then his ascension, he’s also taking with him all of the Old Testament. saints who are translated from Hades into this new heavenly abode. It’s a very interesting feature of what we would call individual personal eschatology, and something I think is notoriously misunderstood in creeds and confessions these days. 

David Capes 

I think you make a good point in the book. Here is the blurb on the back of the book by Amy Peeler. 

With his quintessential clear and playful prose, Mike Bird presents the glories of the faith received from the apostles. And in the second edition, he makes personal contemplation and communal conversation about Christian faith even more achievable. 

That’s great praise! What did you do in the second edition to enhance personal contemplation and communal conversation? What happens here? 

Michael Bird 

Well, generally, I added about 10% more content to the book. I added a few more paragraphs, clarifying a few things here and there, but at the end of each chapter, I would also add these brief reflections and some questions that people might want to consider and think about. That’s something I’ve tried to do. It’s more than, there’s the resurrection of Jesus, or there’s something on the Holy Spirit. I wanted to give Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 6 – 

people some material to think about and to consider after what they’ve read, what they’ve contemplated in this chapter. One of the other things that inspired me to update this book is I found out it’s being used as one of the textbooks for seminary courses in prisons in the United States. Generally, when I talk to my publisher about markets, it’s not one I’m really going in after. 

David Capes 

That’s not one that you think about. There are a lot of Baptists imprisoned in Texas. I don’t know why! It’s a fun book, and I see that you have readers work with one another too in it. There are also QR codes where they can get information. You’re actually teaching through the book. For people like me that can’t get enough of Mike Bird, where do we go to get more of you teaching and speaking? 

Michael Bird 

Oh, there’s a few different places. I’ve got my own podcast with the N.T. Wright, called the Ask N.T. Wright, Anything Podcast. I’ve got a sub stack called Word from the Bird, which I spend a lot of time playing around with. And also a YouTube channel called Early Christian History. So that’s kind of what I do in my copious amounts of spare time when I’m not teaching, academic “deaning,” and all those sorts of tasks. I try to put a few things out in the virtual world. 

David Capes 

For the cost of a premium coffee in the United States, you can have a Word from the Bird on sub stack. That’s the best $7 I spend every month. 

Michael Bird 

Bless you, and if anything, I hope I’m stopping you from drinking more coffee. 

David Capes 

Well, you can’t stop me from doing that. In fact, I drink coffee as I watch you, because I know you love coffee so much! 

Michael Bird 

Yeah, the inside joke here is I have a pathological hatred of coffee. I can’t stand the taste, the smell, or the fact that people spend so much time raving about coffee. 

David Capes 

Well, there we go. Mike Bird, thanks for being with us today and being a part of this. We’re talking about his book today, What Christians Ought to Believe: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine Through the Apostles Creed. It’s a great book and I would recommend it. I may be using this soon as a teaching tool in our church. Thanks, Mike.