The Creed of Antioch

So, since in all the earlier books, I think, we have given the heretic who denies God a complete answer with the weight of the sacred testimonies, let us now come to the faith of the Creed of Antioch and what it is worth. For since he himself was baptized and born again in this creed, he ought to be refuted by his own profession and, so to speak, crushed under the weight of his own weapons. That is the method: as he has already been convicted by the evidence of Holy Scripture, so now he may be convicted by evidence from his own mouth. Nor will there be any need to bring anything else against him, once he has clearly and plainly convicted himself. [a]

This, then, is the text and the faith of the Creed of Antioch: “I believe in one and only true God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, his only Son, and the firstborn of every creature, begotten of him before all ages, and not made; true God from true God, of one substance with the Father; through whom the ages were framed and all things were made. Who for us came, and was born of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was buried; and the third day he rose again according to the Scripture; and ascended into heaven; and will come again to judge the living and the dead,” and so on.

In this creed, which sets out the faith of all the churches, I would like to know which you would rather follow: the authority of men, or of God. Not that I mean to press you hard or unkindly. I give you the chance to choose whichever you please, so that, accepting the one, I may deny the other; for I will grant you and yield to you either of them. And what am I granting, I ask? I will force you to one or the other even against your will. For if you like, you ought to understand of your own free will that one or the other of these is in the creed; if you do not like it, you must be forced to see it against your will.

For, as you know, a creed, in Latin symbolum, gets its name from being a “collection.” What the Greeks call symbolos the Latins call collatio, a collection. And it is called a collection because, when the faith of the whole catholic law was collected together by the Lord’s apostles, everything that is spread over the whole body of the sacred writings in immense fullness of detail was gathered together in sum in the matchless brevity of the creed. So the apostle says: “Completing his word, and cutting it short in righteousness, because the Lord will make a short word upon the earth.” This, then, is the “short word” the Lord made. In a few words he collected the faith of both his Testaments; in a few brief clauses he took in the drift of all the Scriptures, building up his own out of his own, and giving the force of the whole law in a very compact and brief formula. In this, like a most tender father, he provided for the carelessness and ignorance of some of his children, so that no mind, however simple and untaught, would have any trouble with what could so easily be kept in memory.