Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene Creed is a statement of faith, and it is meant to lead to prayer. The Anglican theologian Austin Farrer speaks of “turning the creed into prayer,” and this is the idea I want to pursue here, by way of encouraging prayerful meditation on the central mysteries of faith.
Austin Marsden Farrer (1904–68) was a priest of the Church of England and a brilliant scholar whose work crossed disciplinary boundaries in philosophy, theology, and biblical studies. After a time in parish ministry, he spent most of his career at Oxford, principally as fellow and chaplain of Trinity College and, finally, as warden of Keble College. Farrer was also a celebrated preacher and a close friend of C.S. Lewis. In one of his late works, the slim volume Lord I Believe: Suggestions for Turning the Creed into Prayer (1955), he offers a series of profound meditations on the Apostles’ Creed. (He concludes with a section on praying the rosary, which includes his suggestions for making it more Christocentric.)
Farrer opens Lord I Believe by emphasizing that the creed is inseparable from prayer, and what he says evokes for me the image of a contour map. As he puts it, the creed is a true description of the world we enter when we pray. He writes, “Prayer is the active use or exercise of faith; and the creed defines the contours of that world on which faith trains her eyes.”
Like a contour map, the creed serves to orient us: it shows the lay of the land, how its features relate to one another, and keeps us from getting lost in the vastness of that beautiful country. Farrer points out that while the creed does show us “the truth of things,” this does us little good if we do not “attend to the truth it shows.” Like a contour map, the creed is meant to be used; it invites us to enter, through prayer, the world that it maps.
If we want to journey in the country of prayer, the creed is a necessary guide. Farrer writes, “Though God be in me, yet without the creed to guide me I should know neither how to call upon God, nor on what God to call.” He says that “praying the dogmas of the creed and the mysteries of the gospel” is fundamental to growing in prayer. It is true, he acknowledges, that the saints describe mystical prayer as beyond thought or imagination. But, he insists, sustained mediation on the creed is the necessary precondition for the saints to arrive at this advanced state of prayer. As he puts it,
Renunciations are meaningless when there is nothing to renounce. Before we renounce the use of intellect and imagination we must use them well, we must meditate the creed. And those who have in some fashion mapped the country of their faith will not find that they have taken their bearings once and for all, or that they can, without further looking about, move single-mindedly towards the Centre. They must return often to their starting point and work in afresh from the circumference.
If the creed is like a map guiding us in a foreign country, it will not provide us full knowledge of the country to which it points—and yet we must be humble enough to submit to its direction, if we are to find our way. And it is not enough to look at it once, as it were, and stuff it back into our pocket. We must return again and again in prayerful meditation to the teachings of the creed. This regular recourse will orient us to Christ the Center.
The 20th-century English mystic Evelyn Underhill says something very similar in her meditations on the creed. In The School of Charity (1934), she says that in the creed we find “the map and road-book of that spiritual world which is our true environment, all the needed information about the laws which control it, and all essentials for feedings that inner life of which we talk so much and understand so little.”
What are some ways to put these ideas into practice?
I have found Farrer’s meditations on the creed to be quite stimulating, moving me to prayer. But it may not be so for everyone. Any Christian, however, would benefit from slowly and prayerfully reflecting on the creed—either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. Read the creed phrase by phrase. Turn the words over and over in your heart in prayer. Trace their familiar shape. Wonder at their strangeness. Track down their sources in Holy Scripture. Attend to these ancient words as you might pore over a map of a country you are planning to visit. Lift your heart to the Reality to which they point.
As a further aid to praying the creed, I would recommend reading early Christian thinkers. I have in mind especially theologians writing at the time of the formation of the Nicene Creed in the fourth and fifth centuries. Their writings are saturated with the language of Holy Scripture and combine intellectual rigor with devotional warmth. Reading such old books, C.S. Lewis said, keeps “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” This line comes from a preface Lewis wrote to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, which is exactly the sort of text I have in mind. Other examples would be Augustine’s Sermons 52 and 117 and Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration.
To offer an example of the spirit of early Christian thought, I want to end with the prayer with which Augustine of Hippo closes his great work On the Trinity. I find it one of the most beautiful examples of what it means to turn the creed into prayer. I hope it will also lead you to prayer. Augustine writes:
O Lord our God, we believe in you, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Truth would not have said, Go and baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19), unless you were a trinity. Nor would you have commanded us to be baptized, Lord God, in the name of any who is not Lord God. Nor would it have been said with divine authority, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God (Deut. 6:4), unless while being a trinity you were still one Lord God. And if you, God and Father, were yourself also the Son your Word Jesus Christ, were yourself also your gift the Holy Spirit, we would not read in the documents of truth God sent his Son (Gal. 4:4), nor would you, only-begotten one, have said of the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name (John 14:26), and, whom I will send you from the Father (John 15:26). Directing my attention toward this rule of faith as best I could, as far as you enabled me to, I have sought you and desired to see intellectually what I have believed, and I have argued much and toiled much. O Lord my God, my one hope, listen to me lest out of weariness I should stop wanting to seek you, but let me seek your face always [see Ps. 105:4], and with ardor. Do you yourself give me the strength to seek, having caused yourself to be found and having given me the hope of finding you more and more. Before you lies my strength and my weakness; preserve the one, heal the other. Before you lies my knowledge and my ignorance; where you have opened to me, receive me as I come in; where you have shut to me, open to me as I knock. Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely.
The Rev. Christopher Yoder is rector of All Souls’ Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City. Raised in western Pennsylvania, he studied at Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School.
