A month ago in an Anglican church, I heard a sermon on doubt and disappointment in the life of the believer. It included the following comments:
"We've had a couple conversations in our catechesis class this past fall. And I know a couple people in that class shared very openly, like, use the language of the dark night of the soul. I'm coming, but I feel distant from God. And one thing we talked about is every time we gather on Sunday, on the weekend, on Sunday, for us, Saturday, to worship Christ. And we stand together and we recite the Nicene Creed as most Christians throughout history have done all around the world. We say we believe in God, the Father Almighty. We go through all these words, our belief in Christ. Many of us, when we say that, we don't fully believe.
"We struggle. We doubt. We're disappointed, right? But we come back again and we trust God as best we can with, you know, our very little bit that we can offer. And Jesus is faithful to that, right? He honors that just standing up. Sometimes these aren't even words that make sense to you, but it's the church's words, right? The church carries you. The church's faith carries you. This is one of the reasons why we baptize children and infants, right? Because the true faith is not just about your individual faith. It's about the communal faith of the church. We all need each other. And if some of you are disappointed in Christ, I commend you for showing up today and standing in a couple minutes and saying the creed, just like John the Baptist is saying 'the Christ'. He's letting those words appear on his lips, even though he is uncertain and doubting."
As I hurriedly drafted this post over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles before Burmese church one Sunday afternoon in January, I didn't have access to the recording or transcript, but I summarized it from memory as:
"If you are struggling to believe all the words of the creed that we stand up and say together today, God bless you. Please know that you are not saved by your personal faith and confidence in every part of the creed, but rather you are held by the faith of the entire church, and so when God hears the voice of the entire church on heaven and earth together reciting the creed, he credits their faith to you. [Here my mind was drawing on the medieval idea of the Treasury of Merit.] This is also why we baptize our infants and young children, right? They are held by the church's faith."
This saying disturbed me. And I have thought about it ever since. I asked ChatGPT for some advice, and it reminded me of a letter that Augustine had written to Bishop Boniface (Letter 98, written AD 408), in response to questions on why the church has sponsors affirm the creed on behalf of the infant who is baptized. Augustine proposed some complicated rhetorical reasoning, saying essentially that baptism is the sacrament of the church's faith, and since the infant receives this sacrament of faith, in a sense it is appropriate to say that the infant believes, although it is only by proxy through the sponsors and the church as a whole, and the infant needs to be brought up to believe for himself or herself.
I think there is a sense in which this is true, and a sense in which it is untrue. In the Gospels, sometimes Jesus healed children or slaves because their parents or masters asked in faith. And in the case of the paralyzed man who was let down through a hole in the roof by his friends, Jesus saw their faith and first told the man "Your sins are forgiven" and then told him, "Get up, take up your mat, and walk." Commentators think that Jesus was looking mostly at the faith of the friends, although presumably the man wasn't brought there against his will, and he at least exercised faith by standing up when Jesus told him to.
The theological question is, "What does it mean if Jesus forgave the man's sins because his friends believed?" Does that mean that proxy faith justifies? I am not comfortable with that at all, and in fact, Kevin DeYoung in The Biggest Bible Storybook tells the story with the interpretation that the man must have had faith, or else Jesus wouldn't have told him "your sins are forgiven", because he justifies those who have faith.
If proxy faith justifies, does this mean that we can pray for the salvation of those who have already died outside of the faith? Ordinarily, by that time it is too late.
But notice too that Jesus raised the dead son of the widow of Nain -- we don't know if the son was a believer before he died. I imagine he was after he came back to life.
And in other gospel stories, whole families believed after Jesus healed their child or servant.
And on a plain and simple level, Jesus prayed for those who crucified him and mocked him at this death, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But at Pentecost, Peter boldly pleaded with this same crowd, "save yourself from this perverse generation!" So this forgiveness that Jesus asked for was either only for the sin of crucifying and mocking him, or it was conditional on their repentance and faith, which was mediated through Peter's preaching. Following Tom Schreiner and Ardel Caneday's arguments in The Race Set Before Us, this idea of God using means to bring about active faith leading to obedience on the part of the hearers in fulfillment of his promises makes a lot of sense to me.
At the same time, with edge cases like babies dying in infancy, or unbelievers brought back from the dead, there is a lot that we don't know.
And I'm not even going to get into stories like Augustine's friend who was baptized while he was unconscious for days with a fever -- when he finally woke up, people told him he was baptized, and he took it so seriously that he rebuked Augustine for joking about it. In his mind, he was now fully a Christian, even he hadn't chosen it when it happened. And not long after, he died, still firmly believing. This experience shook Augustine, and he wrote of it later in his Confessions (4.4.8, written AD 397-400). Maybe it was one of the things that together accumulated to draw Augustine himself to finally commit himself to the Lord. Can I say that, both in the case of the paralytic (assuming he didn't have faith until he stood up and walked) and Augustine's friend, that God brought them to faith by gently bending their will to trust and ratify a choice that others had tried to make for them?
But I want now to circle back to the way we conceive of the creeds. In a different church this morning, we sang, "My faith has found a resting place, not in device or creed, I trust the ever living One, his wounds for me shall plead, I need no other argument, I need no other plea, it is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me."
The words rang true to me, that the faith by which we are saved, which the Holy Spirit himself gives us and grows in us, is first a heart attitude of turning toward God, and that belief in the points of the creed follow from that, because the creed summarizes God's Word given in Scripture. It reminded me further of a quote by R.T. Beckwith, which I have copied down in my journal twice in the last few weeks:
"Grace is not a quasi-physical substance but is the personal favor and goodness of God to man. Faith is not mere intellectual belief but is trust, and trust in God involves belief of what he says. Since God speaks to us in Scripture about our salvation, to trust him is both to believe that our sins are already atoned for through the cross of Christ, and to rely on him to accept us, preserve us, perfect us and glorify us for that reason." (J.I. Packer and R.T. Beckwith, The 39 Articles: Their Place and Use Today, pp.91-92)
The words of Beckwith have been ruminating in me since I read another essay he wrote in 1965 (in All in Each Place: Towards Reunion in England) on the problem of doctrinal standards in a proposed union between the Church of England, the Methodist Church, and other free churches. He argued that the Anglicans ought not force subscription to their own doctrinal standards without careful nuance and guarantees of conscience protection, because the independent churches had memories of persecution over aspects of doctrine that were only probably and not certainly proved from Scripture. And yet the Church of England itself needed reform, because it had stopped enforcing a good faith subscription to its own standards by even its own ministers, who developed a variety of private interpretations to stretch the standards whichever way they chose.
In the end, Beckwith proposed a common subscription to the ecumenical creeds from church history in a way that carefully protected conscience and made clear that they were binding only because they accurately summarized the Word of God, and he further proposed selecting the best of the unique parts of the 39 Articles as an Anglican contribution to the good of the united church from their heritage.
The book I quoted on the Articles, published in 1983, was a further development of Beckwith and Packer's overall project to teach a lean and life-giving heritage of doctrine for today, now that the proposed scheme of union had fallen through. The quote above was specifically from an appendix where Beckwith put forward some supplemental articles that should be added to the 39, to address issues that had arisen since the Articles were written in the 1500s. Both Packer and Beckwith are dead now, but their project lives on in unexpected ways, since Packer co-edited the catechism for the Anglican Church in North America (To Be A Christian), and since their writings are fertilizer for this blog post.
The words of the song rang within me because I sang them in a choir twenty years ago led by Jim Schmidt, a man I truly trusted who is now with the Lord.
I am reminded again of a comment that the preacher I mentioned at the beginning of this post made during catechesis -- that the point should be not so much fencing in our doctrine as drawing people toward Christ at the center. I think this aligns with the song, too, and our catechism class as a whole was using Packer's catechism. But Beckwith's framing was particularly helpful to me, because it gets us through the problem of those who insincerely recite the creed with the congregation and think they are fine even though they persist in unrepentance. (See Deuteronomy 29:18-19, and Psalm 50:16) The very words they recited will condemn them at the last day, if they don't turn. That is why it is the job of every church member, not only to recite the creeds, not only to pray for faith and repentance for themselves and their neighbors, but also to pursue holiness and to pursue other members when they are wandering. (Hebrews 12:14-17)
And so, like Augustine (though I don't share his baptismal theology), I am led by a convergence of events and words, some I agree with and others I disagree with, both in following and in reaction, toward a place of deeper faith.
Maybe as intended.
Update 4/6/2026:
I'm now reading Justin Holcomb's book Know the Creeds and Councils, and found this quote explaining the relevance of the Athanasian Creed, with its disturbing anathemas for those who don't hold to it:
"We have a hard time accepting that eternal damnation is the potential result for any human being. This creed serves to remind us of that fact. Even its damnatory clauses are helpful 'in the reminder they give of the awful responsibility of making the right decision in matters of fundamental belief.' The Christian faith is not only a matter of the heart, an exercise in sentimentality, for 'Christian faith is a matter of the mind as well as the heart and the will, and as thinking persons we must give intellectual expression to our faith.' Still it does not demand blind acceptance to empty propositions. It is concerned with the direction of our souls. To paraphrase Philip Schaff, the point of the creed is not that we are saved by memorizing a set of statements, but that we are saved by trusting in the one who has revealed himself. Trusting in him, as far as he has told us about himself, is what saves, while straying from him is what condemns. The Athanasian Creed points us to the identity of the one who saves." (p.70)
I think the pastor that I quoted at the beginning of this post was trying to, indirectly, urge his listeners toward this trust. Where I am a bit uncomfortable is where he implies that we're saved by the church's faith rather than our own. I would say rather that God saves us, and he uses the church, through its relationships and the teaching of the Word to plant the Word in us in order to nurture our faith, and so we can do the same for others.
Kevin DeYoung in his book Daily Doctrine (Days 172-173) helpfully distinguishes different meanings of faith: first, "that which is believed" (doctrinal content) vs "the faith by which we believe" (the attitude of faith, which is what saves us). Second, there are four types of faith, with only the fourth one being necessarily saving: historical faith (mental assent to some facts about God), faith of miracles, temporary faith, and justifying faith (a saving grace, wrought in our hearts by the Spirit and the word of God, whereby we are convinced of our sin and misery, assent to the truth of the gospel, and receive and rest on Christ and his righteousness). General faith means accepting God's word and trusting in the Scriptures. Special faith involves trusting in Christ and the promise of salvation, hungering and thirsting after Jesus, coming to him, and receiving him and all his benefits. Finally, at its simplest, faith consists of knowledge, assent, and trust.
I would say that the Anglican pastor above was guarding against potential fears in the audience that they needed to master doctrinal content before faith could be justifying. And so he first praised their initial movements of trust, even if they were small, and then went back to enfold the idea of faith as the doctrinal content (the creed) in a generalized communal assent and attitude of trust which was modeled by others in the church and could be imitated by the listeners who struggled with doubt. However, the door was opened for evoking proxy-faith and the treasury of merit, which I think are dead ends unless they lead to actual justifying faith on the part of the listeners. Because it was a short sermon, it couldn't unpack everything I've mentioned above. I hope that some of these ideas can help clarify more of the full picture for others and inspire some sense of wonder at the many ways that our God uses to bring us to faith and to nurture that faith in him.
