Credo, the Latin for “I believe”, is the opening word of the baptismal statement of faith of the Western Church that has long been known as the Apostles’ Creed. Credo also begins the longer Nicene Creed used in the Mass and so reverberates in many triumphant, resonant openings of the great choral settings of the Mass, though new liturgies have rightly resorted to the translation of the original Greek, “We believe”, because this creed is the corporate confession of the faith of the whole church. The old creeds, as it was once put, were creeds for catechumens, those being instructed in the faith; the new creeds were for bishops, those who were teachers of the faith.

Creeds were often known as “the rule of faith” or “the symbol of faith”, reminding us that the faith to which they point is larger than the words which seek to articulate that faith. As Newman once put it, “creeds and dogmas live only in the one idea they are intended to express”. God cannot be confined within the capsules of concepts. Even St Thomas Aquinas, the author of that massive work of theological probing and questioning the Summa Theologiae, left it unfinished. After a deep religious experience when celebrating Mass in 1274, the year of his death, he laid down his pen. “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me,” he said.

Contemporary culture, uneasy with religious categories, likes to speak of “faith communities”, as though faith was some kind of inoculation that some people had and others (the majority?) had not.

Yet faith is a far more universal principle. We live by faith because we can live in no other way, the only question is, what is the faith by which we live? The cult of celebrity, political ideology, the amassing of possessions, the addictions that drive us, can in a broad sense all be thought of as instances of faith. So too, more positively, can the searching understanding of the scientist, the imaginative horizons of the artist or composer, and the deep commitments of friendship and marriage. Without some kind of faith none of these things is possible. The human being is not simply a reasoning animal, though reason is also part of the response of faith; reflective faith is, to use an old Christian phrase, “faith seeking understanding”.

The opening confession of the Creed is belief in God. The world and our human identity point beyond themselves to the creative source of all that is. That creative source, which has given rise to the immensities of the Universe, and the rich, imaginative possibilities of personal life, is at least personal, even if, as we rightly recognise, the necessarily human language in which we speak of God cannot compass His transcendent reality.

The poet-priest R. S. Thomas asked why God appeared so frequently in his poems, responded simply: “I believe in God.” Pressed about what sort of God he meant, Thomas replied: “He’s a poet who sang Creation and He’s also an intellect with an ultra-mathematical mind, who formed the entire Universe in it. The answer is in a chapter of Augustine’s Confessions where it says, ‘They all cried out with one voice, He made us’.”

For the Christian this God does not remain unknown, but has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ, in the characteristic way in which persons make themselves known to us, not as ideas and abstractions, not as collections of atoms and molecules, or the patterns of energy of sub-atomic particles, but as persons with a capacity for love and relationship. Love always involves both faith and hope. Without this trio there would be no human life as we know it.

That reality points us to the God who made us, and whose being and action the Christian creeds confess, as one who is a communion of love, and life, and relationship, the source of our being, the ground of our knowing, the goal of our living. To say Credo — I believe — is to open ourselves to the deepest possibility of our lives. As the great preacher St John Chrysostom said: “Let us then draw Him to ourselves, and invite him to aid us in the attempt, and let us contribute our share — goodwill, I mean, and energy. For He will not require anything further, but if He can meet with this only, He will confer all that is his part.”

— The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe