Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary

Earlier forms of the creed seem to have read: “Born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.” The primary affirmation of this article is that the Son of God, the Word, had become human or, as John’s Gospel put it, “flesh” (John 1:14). Preexistence and Incarnation presuppose each other in the Christian view of Jesus Christ. Hence, the New Testament assumed his preexistence when it talked about his becoming human, and, when it spoke of him as preexistent, it was ascribing that preexistence to him whom it was describing in the flesh. It may be that the reference to Mary in the creed was intended to stress primarily her function as the guarantee of Christ’s true humanity, but the creed also intended to teach the supernatural origin of that humanity. Although it is true that neither Paul nor John makes reference to it, the teaching about the virginal conception of Jesus, apparently based upon verse 14 of the seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah, was sufficiently widespread in the 1st century to warrant inclusion in both Matthew and Luke as well as in creeds that date back to the 1st century. As it stands, the creedal statement is a paraphrase of verse 35 of the first chapter of Luke. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit was also involved in the baptism and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried

To a reader of the Gospels, the most-striking feature of the creed is probably its omission of that which occupied a major part of the Gospels, the story of Jesus’ life and teachings. In this respect there is a direct parallel between the creed and the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul. Judging by the amount of space they devoted to the Passion story, even the writers of the Gospels were apparently more interested in those few days of Jesus’ life than they were in anything else he had said or done. The reason for that was the faith underlying both the New Testament and the creed, that the events of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection were the events by which God had accomplished the salvation of human beings. The Gospels found their climax in those events, and the other material in them led up to those events. The Epistles applied those events to concrete situations in the early church.

From the way Paul could speak of the Cross (Philemon 2:6–11) and of “the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23), it seems that before the Gospels came into existence the church commemorated the happenings associated with what came to be called Holy Week. Some of the earliest Christian art was a portrayal of those happenings, another indication of their importance in the cultic and devotional life of early Christianity. How did the Cross effect the salvation of human beings? The answers of the New Testament and the early church to this question involved a variety of metaphors: Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to God; his life was a ransom for many; his death made humankind alive; his suffering was an example to people when they must suffer; he was the Second Adam, creating a new humanity; his death shows people how much God loves them; and others. Every major Atonement theory of Christian theological history discussed below was anticipated by one or another of these metaphors. The New Testament employed them all to symbolize something that could be described only symbolically, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

He descended into hell

The phrase about the descent into hell was probably the last to be added to the creed. Its principal source in the New Testament was the description in the third chapter of the First Letter of Peter (verses 18–20) of Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison. Originally, the descent into hell may have been identified with the death of Christ, when he entered the abode of the dead in the underworld. But in the time before it entered the creed, the descent was frequently taken to mean that Christ had gone to rescue the souls of the Old Testament faithful from the underworld, from what Western Catholic theology eventually called the limbo patrum. Among some of the Church Fathers the descent into hell had come to mean Christ’s declaration of his triumph over the powers of hell. Despite its subsequent growth in importance, however, the doctrine of the descent into hell apparently did not form an integral part of the apostolic preaching about Christ.

The third day he rose again from the dead

The writers of the New Testament nowhere made the Resurrection of Christ a matter for argument but everywhere asserted it and assumed it. With it began that state in the history of Jesus Christ that was still continuing, his elevation to glory. They used it as a basis for three kinds of affirmations. The Resurrection of Christ was the way God bore witness to his son, “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4); this theme was also prominent in the Acts of the Apostles. The Resurrection was the basis for the Christian hope for life after death (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Paul wrote that without it that hope was said to be baseless (1 Corinthians 15:12–20). The Resurrection of Christ was also the ground for admonitions to manifest a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) and to “seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). The writers of the New Testament themselves expressed no doubt that the Resurrection had really happened. But Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians shows that among those who heard the Christian message there was such doubt as well as efforts to rationalize the Resurrection. The differences among the Gospels, and between the Gospels and Paul, suggest that from the outset a variety of traditions existed regarding the details of the Resurrection. But such differences only serve to emphasize how universal the faith in the Resurrection was amid this variety of traditions.

He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty

As indicated earlier, the narrative of the Ascension is peculiar to Luke-Acts, but other parts of the New Testament may refer to it. Such a reference may be made in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians (verses 8–10). However, many interpreters hold that, for Paul, Resurrection was identical with Ascension. That, they maintain, is why he could speak of the appearance of the risen Christ to him in continuity with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) despite the fact that, in the chronology of the creed, the Ascension intervened between them. Session at the right hand of the Father was apparently a Christian interpretation of the first verse of Psalm 110. It implied the elevation—or, as the doctrine of preexistence became clearer, the restoration—of Christ to a position of honor with God. Taken together, the Ascension and the session were a way of speaking about the presence of Christ with the Father during the interim between the Resurrection and the Second Advent. From the Ephesians passage it is evident that this way of speaking was by no means inconsistent with another Christian tenet, the belief that Christ was still present in and with his church. It was, in fact, the only way to state that tenet in harmony with the doctrine of the Resurrection.

From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead

The creed concludes its Christological section with the doctrine of the Second Advent: the First Advent was a coming into the flesh, the Second Advent a coming in glory. Much controversy among modern scholars has been occasioned by the role of this doctrine in the early church. Those who maintain that Jesus erroneously expected the early end of the world have often interpreted Paul as the first of those who began the adjustment to a delay in the end, with John’s Gospel as a more-advanced stage of that adjustment. Those who hold that the imminence of the end was a continuing aspect of human history as Jesus saw it also maintain that this phrase of the creed was a statement of that imminence, without any timetable necessarily implied. From the New Testament it seems that both the hope of the Second Coming and a faith in the continuing presence of Christ belonged to the outlook of the apostolic church, and that seems to be what the creed meant. The phrase “the living and the dead” is a summary of passages on the Second Coming from several of Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians (15:51–52) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15–17).

In order to complete the confession of the creed regarding the glorification of Christ, the Nicene Creed added the phrase “of His kingdom there shall be no end.” That was a declaration that Christ’s return as judge would usher in the full exercise of his reign over the world. Such was the expectation of the apostolic church, based upon what it knew and believed about Jesus Christ.