I believe in one God
But then I believe in three
I’ll believe in twenty gods
If they’ll believe in me
— Leonard Bernstein, Mass, Credo 1:5
When I’m not busy doomscrolling the decline and fall of the American empire or reading up on obscure French theories of how creolized cultures evolve, I’m a co-facilitator of an online parish book study group called Sundays@6. (That, as you can guess, is when we meet.) We’re just finishing up Adam Hamilton’s Creed: What Christians Believe and Wny, and the time has come for me to try to make sense of it all.
Nothing against Hamilton. He’s the lead pastor of the largest United Methodist church in Kansas (he’s also running for US Senate on the Democratic ticket — in Kansas! — so we’ll see if he’s also a miracle worker Nov. 3)! Win, lose, draw or endlessly tied up in litigation brought by the Trump regime, he’s also a very good writer, with a gift for explaining obscure theological points in a lay person’s language. We’ve read at least a half dozen of his books in our Lutheran study group, and we keep coming back for more. He’s that good.
But with me, at least on the subject of creeds, he had an uphill climb.
I’ve known about the fourth-century creeds that came out of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Constantinople, I’ve even recited them in church. Let’s just say they were Greek to me. Literally. Fourth-century Byzantine Greek. My reading of secular history, back in grad school, tells me the creeds were used largely to smoke out heretics (something that always makes me a little nervous as a self-proclaimed spiritual mutt). And they tell me nothing about the moral and ethical requirements of my little patchwork quilt of a personal faith tradition. For that, I have to seek elsewhere.
In fact, when the subject of creeds comes up — what good are they? — I tend to turn not to the creeds but to artistic works like Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. We’ll get back to that in a minute or two.
But first, I want to be fair to Hamilton. So in the interest of giving equal time, I’ll link here to the YouTube trailer for his Creed. It’s as good an intro as any, and better than most:
We’re all searching. Sometimes the search is easy: simply type a question and the answer pops up. But sometimes our questions are complicated, and the answers are difficult to see and harder to articulate. How do we discover and examine the truths that give meaning and purpose to life? Adam Hamilton believes that some powerful answers are contained in the Apostles’ Creed, an early statement of foundational Christian beliefs.
Hamilton promises to consider important questions of life, reality, and truth. And then he does exactly that. But somewhere along the line, long before I ever read Adam Hamilton, I gave up trying to relate the fourth-century Trinitarian and Christological doctrine to my life in the 21st-century. Even in translation, it’s still Greek to me.
Not that it wasn’t important to the Fathers and Mothers of the Byzantine church.
One of my favorite passages in all of Christian apolgetics comes from St. Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote this about the fourth-century Christological debates in Constantinople:
Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the Anomoean [semi-Arian] bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing.
All in all, St. Gregory was quite a guy. He served as bishop of Nyssa, a Byzantine city in what is now central Turkey, from 372 CE (with a brief hiatus) till his death is 394. His elder brother was St. Basil of Caesarea (also in Cappadocia, not to be confused with the Caesarea in Palestine), aka St. Basil the Great. Together with St. Gregory of Nazianzus, they are collectively known as the Cappadocian Fathers, and they were staunch advocates of the creeds adopted at Nicaea and Constantinople.
Like other orthodox Byzantine Christians, Gregory was profoundly influnced by Aristotle, Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers regarding ontology, or the nature of being. In the formulation adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325, he was a homoousian, which means he believed God the Son is of the same essence as God the Father.
While the debates at Nicaea may lose something in translation to modern English, they were a crucial part of the melding of ancient Green and Hebrew thought that produced Christianity. So, even 1,701 years later, they cry out to be taken seriously. With that in mind, I’ll just let Wkipedia take over the discussion for a while:
Gregory, following Basil, defined the Trinity as “one essence [οὐσία] in three persons [ὑποστάσεις]”, the formula adopted by the Council of Constantinople in 381.[35] Like the other Cappadocian Fathers, he was a homoousian, and [his treatise] Against Eunomius affirms the truth of the consubstantiality of the trinity over Eunomius’ Aristotelian belief that the Father’s substance is unengendered, whereas the Son’s is engendered.[36] According to Gregory, the differences between the three persons of the Trinity reside in their differing hypostatic origin, and the triune nature of God is revealed through divine action (despite the unity of God in His action).[37][38] The Son is therefore defined as begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father, and the Father by his role as progenitor. [Links in the original.]
Got that? But as I read more about Gregory, I find myself wondering if it’s entirely fair to him to dwell on what he thought about those creeds.
By all accounts, St. Gregory was overshadowed by his brother (you just don’t get to be called Basil “the Great” for nothing)! But Wikipedia, which I consider my personal Summa Theologica or summary of all things theological, says St. Gregory was “a highly original and sophisticated thinker,’ albeit one who is “difficult to classify.” My kind of guy, in other words.
For one thing, he was one of the first thinkers — of any faith tradition — to come out against slavery. An enslaved person, he reasons, is created in the image of God. So, he asks, “who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself.” For another, Gregory was a universalist. Wikipedia puts it like this:
Gregory argues that when Paul says that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), this means that though some may need to undergo a long period of purification, eventually “no being will remain outside the number of the saved”[47] and that “no being created by God will fall outside the Kingdom of God”.[48] Due to the unity of human nature in Christ “all, thanks to the union with one another, will be joined in communion with the Good, in Jesus Christ Our Lord”.[49] Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection results in “total salvation for human nature”. [Links and footnotes in the original.]
Is there an echo here of the ancient Greek philosophy that led fourth-century Byzantine theologians to debate the essence, or ontological being of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? I’m no expert in the classics, and I wouldn’t know Philo of Alexandria from Bugs Bunny. But I suspect there’s more here than an echo of the synthesis of Hebrew and Greek thought that produced a Christian faith tradition separate from Judaism. Which leads me to a corollary: Even when it sounds like bafflegab to our ears, it has to be respected.
Gregory also had a mystical streak. My Wikipedian summa theologica suggests it grows out of his belief the infinite creator God is “essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings.” You can’t get where you want to go by reason alone.
[…] due to God’s infinitude, a created being can never reach an understanding of God, and thus for man in both life and the afterlife there is a constant progression [ἐπέκτασις] towards the unreachable knowledge of God, as the individual continually transcends all which has been reached before.[45] In the Life of Moses, Gregory speaks of three stages of this spiritual growth: initial darkness of ignorance, then spiritual illumination, and finally a darkness of the mind in mystic contemplation of the God who cannot be comprehended. [Links in the original.]
Elsewhere, Gregory says (as quoted in my Wikipedian summa): “Due to the unity of human nature in Christ ‘all, thanks to the union with one another, will be joined in communion with the Good, in Jesus Christ Our Lord’.”
I’m in way over my head here, but does this sound just a little bit like, oh, let’s say for example St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who famously said (as quoted in Goodreads), “Christ was made man that we might be made God?”
Or, for that matter, like the 20th-century Lutheran theologian Tuomo Mannermaa of the University of Helsinki, who studied the fathers and mothers of the early church in dialog with Russian Orthodox theologians and concluded Christ is present in the faith of the believer. Goodreads quotes his book Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View Of Justification like this:
Thus the righteousness of Christ becomes our righteousness through faith in Christ, and everything that is his, even he himself, becomes ours … and he who believes in Christ clings to Christ and is one with Christ and has the same righteousness with him. [Ellipsis in the original.]
Mannerrmaa and the Finnish school are controversial, but this puts me on good, solid Lutheran ground. It squares with my belief God is everywhere and there’s a little bit of God incarnate in all of us — indeed, in all of God’s creation.
Fine. All well and good, but what about the fourth-century creeds?
I can no more put myself in the mindset of an early Byzantine mystic than I can strap on wings and fly to the moon. The best I can do is to accept the creeds as expressions of faith that have Christians have acted on for 1,700 years. What does this mean? I can’t put it better than Martin Luther did in 1529, in his Small Catechism:
I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith. In the same way He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.
Let’s parse that. I think it boils down to: “I believe that I cannot […] believe.” But here’s what I can do: I can accept the authority of the church, which calls, gathers, enlightens, and — hopefully — sanctifies me. Which means I can accept the creed as a symbol (both in today’s sense of the word and St. Cyprian of Carthage’s original sense in koine Greek as a watchword or sign of inclusion) without getting into a philosophical debate about its terms.
In fact, when the early creeds come up in conversation, my mind usually turns to a song in Leonard Bernstein’s MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers. First performed in 1971 for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts it is, as the title suggests, not a celebration of the Mass or Holy Communion, but a musical about the Eucharist. Its story line is about a priest, or celebrant, who is tempted by an angry, irreverent street chorus to doubt the sacrament but recovers when a birdlike Holy Spirit restores a worshipful order.
The song I keep coming back to is heard in the Credo (Latin for “I believe”), when a Rock Singer in the street chorus steps forward and sings:
I believe in one God
But then I believe in three
I’ll believe in twenty gods
If they’ll believe in me.
And the street chorus chimes in:
That’s a pact
Shake on that
No taking back.
Toward the end of his song, the rock singer from the street chorus pledges, “I’ll believe in sugar and spice / I’ll believe in everything nice.” Is he being sarcastic? You decide. I can’t. But at the very end, he strikes a plaintive note:
I’ll believe in you and you and you
And who
Who’ll believe in me?
Should I be worried that out of all the characters in Bernstein’s Mass, which is kind of a kaleidoscope of stage effects, choreography and musical styles, the one I choose to identify is a raggedy street musician with a sarcastic attitude? Bernstein doesn’t give me very much to go on there, other than the overall redemptive narrative arc of his theater piece.
But maybe that’s just the way the Spirit comes to me.
Works Cited
Leonard Bernstein, MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers, X. Credo – 5. Trope: “I Believe in God,” Sony, 1971 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZDRFgAjR9s&t=120s.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti, quoted in my blog, “Links — St. Gregory of Nyssa ** UPDATED ** w/ NEW LINK AND FRESH TRANSLATION,” Hogfiddle, June 29, 2007 https://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2007/06/links-st-gregory-of-nyssa.html.
Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), The Creed, The Third Article, Sanctification (St. Louis: Concordia) https://catechism.cph.org/en/creed.html.
Roger Pearse, “A famous passage of Gregory of Nyssa… but where from?” Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristic, Information Access, and More, June 19, 2009 https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2009/06/19/a-famous-passage-of-gregory-of-nyssa-but-where-from/.
[Uplinked Oct. 29, 2026]
I always enjoy reading your posts. This one I’ll have to return to for further study. Thank you!
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