No Greater Love: The Apostle’s Creed

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Professor Joseph Ratzinger opens part III of Introduction to Christianity, entitled “The Spirit and the Church”, with a chapter concerning the intrinsic unity of the last several statements of the Apostle’s Creed. These statements are: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” According to Professor Ratzinger, the last articles of faith flow naturally from the first article, the belief in the Holy Spirit. Here, he explains why this is so. In the original Greek text the central statement in the third section of the Creed runs simply: "I believe in Holy Spirit." The definite article to which we are accustomed in our translation is thus missing. This is very important for the interpretation of the original meaning, for it means that this article was at first really understood in terms of salvation history, not of the Trinity. In other words, the third section of the Creed refers in the first place, not to the Holy Spirit as the third Person in the Godhead, but to the Holy Spirit as God's gift to history in the community of those who believe in Christ. 

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The doctrine of the Trinity deals with who God is. Christians believe that the Trinity is revealed by God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Salvation history is concerned with what God has done in human history; the action of God is human history. Examples of this would be the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, or Pentecost among many other things. Professor Ratzinger asserts that these two ways of looking at God have been separated although they really belong together. To this extent the interplay of "salvation history" and Trinitarian viewpoints is characteristic of the oldest stages of Christian thought. Later on this interaction was more and more forgotten, with unfortunate results, so that a division resulted between theological metaphysics, on the one side, and theology of history, on the other. Henceforth both coexist alongside each other as two completely different things; people indulge either in ontological speculation or anti-philosophical theology of salvation history, thus losing in a really tragic way the original unity of Christian thought. 

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A consequence of this separation of the doctrine of the Trinity from salvation history was that the belief in the Holy Spirit was separated from the belief in the holy Catholic Church. Instead of seeing that the Church is the product of the Holy Spirit, the Church became seen as a worldly institution which sprung up in response to the Incarnation. The Church is something which we produced rather than being the product of the power and operation of the Holy Spirit. 

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Next, Professor Ratzinger discussed the articles on the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins. The remaining statements in the third section of the Creed are intended to be nothing more than developments of its basic profession, "I believe in Holy Spirit." These developments proceed in two directions. First comes the phrase about the communion of saints, which did not figure in the original text of the creed formulated in the city of Rome itself but nevertheless represents an ancient tradition of the Church. Then comes the phrase about the forgiveness of sins. Both statements are to be understood as. concretizations of the words about the Holy Spirit, as descriptions of the way in which this Spirit works in history. Both have a directly sacramental meaning of which we are hardly aware today. The saying about the communion of saints refers, first of all, to the Eucharistic community, which through the Body of the Lord binds the Churches scattered all over the earth into one Church. Thus originally the word sanetorum (of the holy ones) does not refer to persons but means the holy gifts, the holy thing, granted to the Church in her Eucharistic feast by God as the real bond of unity. Thus the Church is not defined as a matter of offices and organization but on the basis of her worship of God: as a community at one table around the risen Christ, who gathers and unites them everywhere. Of course, very soon people began to include in this idea the persons who themselves are united with one another and sanctified by God's one, holy gift. The Church began to be seen, not just as the unity of the Eucharistic table, but also as the community of those who through this table are united among themselves. Then from this point a cosmic breadth very soon entered into the concept of Church: the communion of saints spoken of here extends beyond the frontier of death; it binds together all those who have received the one Spirit and his one, life-giving power. We are in communion not only with Catholics from other parts of the world but also with Catholics of all times who received the Eucharist. 

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The phrase about the forgiveness of sins, on the other hand, refers to the other fundamental sacrament of the Church, namely, baptism; and from there it very soon came to include the sacrament of penance. At first, of course, baptism was the great sacrament of forgiveness, the moment when a visible transformation took place. Only gradually, through painful experience, did people come to see that even the baptized Christian needs forgiveness, with the result that the renewed remission of sins granted by the sacrament of penance advanced more and more into the foreground, especially since baptism moved to the 'beginning of life and thus ceased to be an expression of active conversion. Nevertheless, the fact remains even now that one cannot become a Christian by birth but only by rebirth: Christianity only ever comes into being by man's turning his life around, turning away from the self-satisfaction of mere existence and being "converted". In this sense baptism remains, as the start of a life-long conversion, the fundamental pattern of the Christian existence, as the phrase about the "remission of sins" is intended to remind us. But if Christianity is regarded, not as a chance grouping of men, but as the about-turn into real humanity, then this profession of faith goes beyond the circle of the baptized and means that man does not come to himself if he simply abandons himself to his natural inclination. To become truly a man, he must oppose this inclination; he must turn around: even the waters of his nature do not climb upward of their own accord. In order to convert, we must freely cooperate with the Holy Spirit. 

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To summarize all this, we can now say that in our Creed the Church is understood in terms of the Holy Spirit, as the center of the Spirit's activity in the world. Concretely, she is seen from the two angles of baptism (penance) and the Eucharist. This sacramental approach produces a completely theocentric understanding of the Church: the foreground is occupied, not by the group of men composing her, but by the gift of God that turns man around toward a new being that he cannot give to himself, to a communion he can only receive as a gift. Yet precisely this theocentric image of the Church is entirely human, entirely real; by centering around conversion and unification, and understanding both as a process that cannot be brought to completion within history, it reveals the meaningful human connection between sacrament and Church. Thus the "objective" view (from the angle of the gift of God) brings the personal element into play' of its own accord: the new being of forgiveness leads us into fellowship with those who live from forgiveness; forgiveness establishes communion; and communion with the Lord in the Eucharist leads necessarily to the communion of the converted, who all eat one and the same bread, to become in it "one body" (I Cor 10:17) and, indeed, "one single new man" (cf. Eph 2:15). Ultimately, the Holy Spirit is the source of the worldwide unity of the Church.

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The concluding words of the Creed, too, the profession of faith in the "resurrection of the body" and "life everlasting", are to be understood as the unfolding of faith in the Holy Spirit and his transforming power, whose final effect they depict. For 'the prospect of resurrection, on which the whole section here converges, follows necessarily from faith in the transformation of history that started with the Resurrection of Jesus. With this event, as we have seen, the frontier of bios, in other words, death, was crossed and a new continuum was opened up: the biological has been overtaken by the spirit, by love, which is stronger than death. Thus the barrier of death has been broken through in principle, and a definitive future has been opened up for man and world. This conviction, in which faith in Christ and acknowledgment of the power of the Holy Spirit meet, is expressly applied in the last words of the Creed to the future of all of us. The sight of the Omega of world history, in which everything will be fulfilled, results by an inner necessity from faith in the God who himself wished to be, in the Cross, the Omega of the world, its last letter. Precisely by this he has made the Omega into his point, so that one day love is definitively stronger than death, and out of the "complexification" of bios by love the final complex emerges, the finality of the person and the finality of unity that comes from love. Because God himself became a mere worm, the last letter in the alphabet of creation, the last letter has become his letter and thereby turned history toward the final victory of love: the Cross really is the salvation of the world. St. Paul explains it for us in this way: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit who dwells in you,” (Rom 8:11). The Holy Spirit is God’s most precious gift to us.

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--Jim Nugent, CFP