The Jesus Creed

Tom Goddard
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

This, I believe.

That is what we say when we recite creeds, particularly in the Christian tradition in which I was raised.

This, I believe.

Today I want to write about belief, about creeds.

The Nicene Creed, which is the creed of my childhood, made me uncomfortable for years. However, it is not just the Nicene Creed that has had that effect on me. For my entire life, I have much the same reaction to the other creed I read from time to time in church, the Apostles’ Creed. Check it out:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.

There is something in these creeds that bothers me. Actually, the problem is not what is in them, but what is not in them.

Have you noticed? Isn’t something missing? Something that is allegedly of some importance to the followers of Jesus?

The most popular creeds heard in Christian churches across the United States say absolutely nothing about the ministry of Jesus.

As Robert Funk puts it, these are “creeds with an empty center.”[1]

Listen to the Apostles’ Creed:

“. . . born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. . . .”

And, now, the Nicene Creed:

“. . . was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.”

Jesus was born, and then he died. Everything else, except a passing reference in the Apostles’ Creed to the forgiveness of sins, is about things other than the life and ministry of Jesus.

No Beatitudes.

Nothing of the parables.

No Lord’s Prayer.

No loving of enemies, no turning of cheeks, no walking the extra mile.

In other words, absolutely nothing of the radical doctrine that Jesus spoke in his short ministry made it into the two fundamental statements of faith that undergird the Christian Church.

In my humble opinion, this is crazy. Worse than crazy, these “creeds with an empty center” are an opportunity lost. These ancient creeds speak almost exclusively to what the earliest followers of Jesus believed about him. They do not answer the central question: What did Jesus believe? What was the nature of the faith of Jesus? How did he see the world?

If one wanted to, as the old bracelets invited so many to ask, do what Jesus would do, it seems to me that it sure would help to know what he believed.

To model one’s self after Jesus requires one to take his heart and love as he loved, to take his mind and believe what he believed, to take his eyes and see the world like he saw it.

One needn’t worry about acting like Jesus, because once one loves, believes, and sees like Jesus, one is a good bit more likely to act like him. Actions will follow hearts, minds, and eyes.

So, what did Jesus believe?

What was Jesus’ creed?

As I look back on my own spiritual growth, I see deep in my childhood this notion, that . When my parents and I visited Jerusalem in 1967, we bought my family’s first red-letter Bible. All of a sudden, the words of Jesus sprang off the pages, and it was clear to me that it was what Jesus said that caused my heart to dance. The way he loved, the God he knew, the world he saw, all shine through his words.

His world-view — no, rather his God-view — is what I wanted to know as a boy, and is what I want to know as a man.

This is not so easy, this task of discovering the beliefs of Jesus through his words. As Thomas Jefferson, Albert Sweitzer, and many others have realized, these followers of Jesus, and the myriad translators in the two millennia since, have stumbled more than occasionally in accurately conveying to us what this remarkable man said.

In recent years, however, much prayer and scholarship have provided a clearer view of what the rabbi from Nazareth actually said, and therefore what he believed. It is like the search for the hidden treasure, or the pearl of great price. The yearning for it is enormous, and the joy of discovery, even greater.

So, I am working on a new creed. Or maybe it’s a very old creed. In any event, I’m writing what I will call the Jesus Creed.

In the next few posts in this space, I will share with you what I have come up with so far. It is not finished, and I fear it is not as good as it should be. It is sure to seriously irritate some folks along the way. For example, I commit the heresy of including the Gospel According to Thomas. I leave out most of The Gospel According to John. Both choices are based on a good bit of scholarship that tried to sort out what Jesus actually said from the words more likely to have been placed in his mouth decades after his death.

So what! I’ve committed far more heresies than just this one, including chanting Hindu prayers, sitting zazen, preaching Tantric wisdom, and quoting Hafiz. Paying more attention to Thomas than to John surely is no worse than these.

So, here we go.

The Jesus Creed

[1] Funk, R. W. (1996). Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium. HarperCollins: San Francisco, p. 43.

Evolving Love

Musings on participation in the evolution of Love itself.

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Tom Goddard

Written by

I’m a devotee of Love in all her manifestations. She manifests in me as a husband, father, musician, writer, entrepreneur, psychologist, activist, & mystic.

Evolving Love

Musings on participation in the evolution of Love itself.

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