In a recent Sunday service, our church sang a rather uncharacteristic hymn not found in the denominational hymnal: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place. I associate this hymn with chapel services at the Baptist university I attended in Minnesota in my youth, as well as in the affiliated church of which our family was part around the same time. In many respects it’s a great hymn, nicely communicating the message of the gospel and the assurance of salvation.
My faith has found a resting place,
Not in device nor 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.
That said, the second line would appear to conflict with the reality that our church communion is bound by the ecumenical creeds and the Reformed confessional standards of the 17th century, updated and supplemented by a quite good late-20th-century document called Living Faith. Moreover, because the text consistently uses the first-person-singular pronoun throughout, it tempts me to assume that my faith functions independently of the larger Christian community of which I am part.
Of course, my faith is in Jesus Christ, and not in a human-authored creedal statement. The element of truth in the hymn is that intellectual assent to dogma is not the same as a personal trust in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for my salvation. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19) Nevertheless, as our forebears in the faith well understood, we need a creed for at least two reasons.
First, a creed establishes the outer boundaries of the faith. The most ecumenical of our creeds, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, was compiled in the heat of controversy over the person of Christ and the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the 4th century, when on two occasions the bishops of the church were assembled, following the precedent established in Acts 15, to settle the issues at stake. The result was a creed that is binding on both eastern and western churches. Originally expressed in the first-person-plural—”We believe in one God”—it was later modified to speak in the first-person-singular: “I believe in one God . . . .” But whether in the plural or the singular, it expresses beautifully the faith of a community. Adhering to this faith is not only a sign of inclusion, as some might express it today. It is a matter of life and death, as the pseudo-Athanasian creed tells us: “This is the catholic faith: one cannot be saved without believing it firmly and faithfully.” To stray beyond the boundaries of the faith is to place oneself in peril. Thus the need for a creed.
But, second, to admit our need for a creed is to recognize our need for a faith community to support us in our walk with God in Jesus Christ. I cannot do this alone. Even when I think that God has given me the strength to get through life, I am continually reminded of why I need the larger community of faith, which is not just an assembly of like-minded individuals who believe the same things and prefer to worship in a certain way. The gathered church institution is nothing less than the covenant community of all who have been cleansed in the waters of baptism and called by God into a living relationship with himself and with his people.
If I am experiencing doubts—if I am silently questioning whether God loves me or whether I can rely on his promises—gathering with his people regularly to hear the Word, recite the Creed, and receive the sacraments is a vivid reminder that others are present to support me in my walk. This is why the current pandemic, during which most of our churches have shifted to online services, is taxing our capacity to confess our faith in the first-person-plural. As necessary as such measures may be in a public health emergency, I would not be surprised if many Christians are finding their faith weakened for lack of a proximate flesh-and-blood community to carry them through times of crisis and doubt.
In recognition of our need for community, I propose a change to the second line of this otherwise beautiful hymn:
My faith has found a resting place,
As witnessed in our 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.
May God hasten the day when we can once again gather in-person to worship as a community of faith.
