After Pentecost: Following the Holy Spirit through the Apostles' Creed
I am enough of a Pentecostal to feel a little out of place when reciting the Apostles’ Creed. Sometimes when I recite it, I feel as though I’m pretending to be fancier or more pious than I am. (The image that comes to mind is of our two-year-old putting his feet inside my dress shoes and clomping around the house.)
Last fall, we spent several weeks examining the Apostles’ Creed. This summer, our children’s curriculum centers on the Apostles’ Creed. (Thank you to our wonderful Solid Rock Kids leaders, as well as Ben Myers and Natasha Kennedy, who wrote and illustrated the book we are using.) We’ve recited the Creed regularly at our midweek prayer service for several years. We’ll recite it as part of our upcoming baptism service, and we’ll hear our kids sing the words of the Creed during the service.
In contrast to the past few years, the Apostles’ Creed was not a regular part of my worship diet growing up. For that reason, I have always felt a kind of imposter syndrome toward it, which, I confess, still affects the way I approach it.
A possible advantage of being a latecomer to the Apostles’ Creed is that I’m less prone to familiarity blindness. The Creed is still fresh enough to me that its structure remains intriguing, even surprising.
An example of what fascinates me about the Creed that a more experienced reader might pass over without a second thought is its treatment of the Holy Spirit (did I mention I’m a Pentecostal?)
There are many things we might confess about the Holy Spirit’s work, but the Creed, compact as it is, explicitly highlights only one, and probably not the one I would have thought to include: “[Jesus] was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Of all the things we could say about the Spirit’s activity, we confess only the role of the Spirit’s power in Jesus’ conception, in bringing the Word to life.
In addition to the fact that the Creed is silent about the Holy Spirit’s other activities, which are well-documented throughout Scripture, I also find it surprising that the first mention of the Holy Spirit comes several lines before we confess belief in Him. Is this some sort of oversight? Shouldn’t “I believe in the Holy Spirit” come first? And why the long break between references to the Holy Spirit?
At first glance, this sequence seems counterintuitive. But there’s a sense in which the Holy Spirit’s presence in the Creed prior to our confession of belief in Him fits: Yes, I believe in the Holy Spirit, but my experience of His power precedes any of my attempts to provide a rational account of the situation.
2.
In thinking about the Creed’s peculiarly sequenced references to the Holy Spirit, I’m reminded of Robert Jenson’s memorable statement about God that plays with chronology in a similar way. “God,” Jenson says, “is whoever raised Christ from the dead, having previously raised Israel out of Egypt.” (It was also Jenson, I believe, who said that the Creed reminds us that Jesus had both a mother and murderer).
Jenson’s concise characterization of God’s identity alludes to two significant saving acts in the narrative of Scripture. Plenty of time passes between the two events to which he refers, and notably, Jenson’s sentence reverses their order. He mentions the resurrection before Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. In this way, Jenson underscores God’s consistency throughout the Bible as one who liberates from both captivity and death.
Commenting on the genius of Jenson’s turn of phrase, Stanley Hauerwas says, “What [Jenson] does is help us see why the word ‘whoever’ is absolutely crucial. What the word does is render problematic the presumption that you knew who God was prior to God having made Godself known by raising Jesus from the dead.”
Just as God’s activity in the Hebrew Scriptures shapes the way we read the New Testament, the reality of Christ’s resurrection sheds new light upon the events of the Hebrew Scriptures.
A similar “problematizing of presumption” is at work in the Apostles’ Creed, which has us mentioning the Spirit overshadowing Mary prior to confessing belief in Him. In this way, The Creed’s structure calls into question whether we can rightly bear witness to the Spirit’s work today apart from the Spirit’s presence with Mary two millennia ago.
Or, to riff on Jenson, we might posit that, at least as far as the Creed is concerned, the Holy Spirit is whoever empowered the church to bear Christ to the world having first empowered Mary to bear Christ in her womb.
In other words, we don’t rightly identify the Spirit who sends the Church on mission without first acknowledging the Spirit who overshadows Mary.
Another peculiarity of the Creed’s treatment of the Spirit is who shows up next to him: the one who was conceived by the Spirit’s power suffers under Pontius Pilate. (For those keeping score, that’s one mention of the Holy Spirit, and one mention of, yes, Pontius Pilate, the one who Karl Barth says appears in the Creed “like a dog into a nice room.”)
Lest we get too bent out of shape by Pilate’s seeming intrusion into a perfectly good Creed, Luke Bretherton assures us that the Creed we confess contains a bit of irony: the reference to Pilate underscores his ultimate insignificance
“Pilate is in the creeds because his reversal is vital for understanding why the gospel is good news. Pilate, far from being the center of the story, (and in the archive of recorded history, it is the Pilates of this world who are always the center of the story), is a marginal figure.”
As we breathe a collective sigh of relief, Bretherton drives home his point, arguing that Pilate is not only a minor player, but also that he’s there only to reinforce the primacy of another, more powerful one:
“In contrast to Pilate, and in him all worldly authorities of which he is a type, the resurrection and ascension reveal the deepest and only life-giving source of power: the power of the Spirit.”
According to this reading, Pilate appears in the Creed not primarily to tell us more about Pilate and his power, but rather, by way of juxtaposition, to tell us more about the Spirit and His power.
3.
In the Creed, Jesus is conceived by the power of a Holy Spirit in whom we have not yet confessed belief. This awkward progression is again fitting insofar as being clothed with power from on high is itself a fundamentally disorienting experience.
Mary, for example, responds to the angelic announcement of the Spirit’s coming with the question, “How can this be?” Likewise, when the Spirit descends upon the gathered believers in Acts 2, confused onlookers ask, “What does this mean?”
Because the Spirit’s presence is so often unexpected, I find it easier to sympathize with the confused onlookers than I do with Peter, who apparently considers the commotion of several voices speaking at once on the Day of Pentecost to be exactly the right environment for preaching a sermon.
(As a side note, I find it interesting to contrast the ways Pilate and Peter respond to their respective eager audiences. Pilate speaks from a place of fear (John 19:8), while Peter steps forward with boldness. Pilate is fixated on his own power over, while Peter testifies to the power on offer to all.)
Speaking of the Day of Pentecost, the line “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” which appears toward the end of the Creed, passes without so much as a word about the sort of supernatural accounts I have been conditioned to associate with the manifestation of the Spirit. Speaking in tongues, for example. Or divine healing. At least the first mention of the Spirit gives us a power encounter. “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” though? No rushing wind or tongues of fire here.
Instead, following our confession of belief in the Holy Spirit, there’s only silence, a comma-length pause before we’re ushered on to the next item in a list of things that seem crammed in before the Creed’s final period. (“Shouldn’t we have we said something by now about the forgiveness of sins?” we can almost hear the Creed’s architects ask each other, wringing their hands.)
But what about that next item in the list? When reciting the Creed, we say, “I believe in the Holy Spirit” and “the holy catholic Church” in the same breath. Nothing ties them together save their proximity, and yet, the fact that they are adjoined near the end of everything seems to capture something important about the shape of redemptive history. If we insist on including line breaks after each item in that list, we can see the promised Spirit resting, poetically, atop the Church:
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
The holy catholic Church
When the Holy Spirit turns up for the second and final time in the Apostles’ Creed, He does so between Jesus, who is at the right hand of the Father, and His bride, you and I, the Church.
Thankfully, just as the Spirit’s first mention situates him near Jesus and Mary (and, yes, even Pilate,) in the end, the Spirit occupies the mediating space between the divine and human. Here, between the ascended Christ and the Church He makes holy, the Spirit intercedes.
4.
In a way, everything I’ve labored to articulate above—all my hesitancy about and fascination with the Holy Spirit’s presence in the Creed—can be summed up in a single image: the icon of the Ascension.
The icon is not intended to be a straightforward depiction of the biblical account of the Ascension. (Mary is shown in the icon, for example, but not mentioned in Luke’s telling. Even Paul, whose story is yet to be told, appears on Mary’s left, face upturned.) Rather, the icon layers several realities into one scene, inviting the viewer to understand the significance of the Ascension anew.
As is the case in the Apostles’ Creed, the icon of the Ascension doesn’t appear to have much to say about the Holy Spirit. It depicts an event before the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost and, like the Creed, gestures toward Mary as the bearer of God’s Spirit.
In the icon, two heavenly beings usher Christ heavenward, while two more, clothed in white, add another question to the list of those the disciples are already asking themselves: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking into heaven?”
Although the Holy Spirit is not visibly present in the icon, the commotion and confusion among the gathered disciples resembles what I imagine the scene to have looked like on the day of Pentecost. We might see this depiction of the Ascension as a sort of dress rehearsal for Pentecost, except that here, the angels deliver the lines while Peter stands speechless.
On a personal level, I can resonate with the collective uncertainty shown in the disciples’ expressions and gestures. I can situate myself among them, slack-jawed, or perhaps quibbling with the still-ascending Christ about his suspect ordering of things: “If you’re going to send a helper, wouldn’t it be better to have him show up before you left?”
In my alarm, I’m certain I wouldn’t notice Mary, who stands in the center, facing the viewer. Her calm demeanor contrasts with the tumult surrounding her. Yes, we’ve been instructed to wait to be clothed with power from on high, but among us is one whose experience of being overshadowed by the Spirit’s power now shapes her response to an uncertain future.
Through her composure, Mary embodies the presence of the otherwise invisible Spirit. In so doing, she serves as an example to the Church, tasked as we are to bear Christ to a world every bit as tumultuous as the one she stands both apart from and among.
The so-called “Season after Pentecost” spans several weeks, long enough for God’s people to become disoriented and lose track of time.
Like the disciples in the icon, we might contort ourselves in unnatural ways to avoid losing sight of the one to whom we would rather cling.
We might screw up our faces at the prospect of being left to deal with one another.
We might crane our necks in any number of directions to try and discern from which direction help will come.
We might busy ourselves with an endless list of tasks to avoid waiting for what we have been promised.
All the while, the Spirit overshadows us, working intimately among us but independently of our contrivances, to form Christ in us.
Any time I recite the Apostles’ Creed, I am reacquainted with the truths I believe. But especially during the Season After Pentecost on the Church calendar, when I can most easily sympathize with the disoriented disciples who look heavenward for Jesus, the Apostles’ Creed provides a timely reminder: before he was born in to our power-hungry world, he was conceived by the power of an altogether different Spirit.