In this context, too, it is no accident that the Latin name for a creed is precisely symbolum. The early creeds, and the baptismal confessions which partly underlay them, were not little pieces of abstract theologizing to satisfy the curious intellect, but symbols which functioned as such, badges which marked out this community from others in terms of the god in whom they believed.39 From the start, Christian creeds were not so much a matter of ‘faith seeking understanding’ as ‘community seeking definition’—and finding it in that which was believed about the true god.
