The Apostles' Creed Quotes

“Although I’m indeed an old doctor,” he said, “I never move on from the childish doctrine of the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. I still daily learn and pray them with my little Hans and my little Lena.” He had just as much to learn about the Lord as his children.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Is there anyone who never feels a flicker of doubt when they contemplate the mysteries of faith? Can anyone really say the amen with all their heart? Isn’t it really here, at the last word of the creed, that we ought to cross our fingers? Shouldn’t we end the creed by saying: “Oh boy, I hope so!” How can anyone have the audacity to say “Amen”?”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Jesus is always being falsely accused, and there is never a time when he is not being accused.… He is still silent in the face of this and does not answer with his own voice. But he makes his defense in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Pontius Pilate is there to remind us that God has acted at a particular moment in human history. The salvation of the world can be dated. Certain people were there when it happened.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“That is how it goes in the Old Testament: at the great turning points of history, we find a woman, pregnant, and an infant child brought into the world by the powerful promise of God. Israel’s story is a story of miraculous births.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Gregory says to the slave owner, “you have forgotten the limits of your authority.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Gnosticism was the most comprehensive intolerance imaginable. It was intolerance of the universe and of life and of whatever it means to be human.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“The name of Pontius Pilate is a historical anchor. It prevents us from turning the Christian faith into a set of general truths about the world. It reminds us that the gospel is not an idea but a fact.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“when we say the Apostles’ Creed we are reminded that life itself is founded on trust. Christians in the ancient church went naked to the waters of baptism. The second birth is like the first. We are totally dependent. We bring nothing with us except life. The birth cry of baptism is the threefold “I believe” of the creed, a cry of total trust in the Triune God.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“We believe that the spiritually strong and the spiritually weak are both sustained by the same forgiving grace. We believe that we rely solely on grace, not only in our worst failures but also in our best successes. We believe that if ever we should turn away from grace, if ever our hearts grow cold and we forget our Lord and become unfaithful to his way, he will not forget us. His faithfulness is deeper than our faithlessness. His yes is stronger than our no.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Failures in discipleship—even dramatic public failures—do not exclude a person from the grace of God.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“God’s plan of salvation all along has been to create one human society as the bearer of the divine image. In that sense, the church isn’t just the way people respond to salvation; the church is salvation. The church is what God has been doing in the world from the beginning. It is a representative microcosm of what God intends for the whole human family.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“To quote Irenaeus again, because Jesus has ascended we also “ascend through the Spirit to the Son, and through the Son to the Father.”32 In Jesus, our nature has taken up residence in the presence of God.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“By nature we are all on the way from birth to death. But by grace we are traveling in the opposite direction. The Christian life is a mystery that moves from death to birth. At the beginning we are baptized into Christ’s death; and at the end we are born into the life of the resurrection. We are born as though dying; we die as those who are being born.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Because he shares our nature he is able to fall with us into death; because he is the Son of God he is able to fill death with his presence so that the grave becomes a source of life. In Christ, the dead are united to God and are alive in the strength of that union. The resurrection is not just an isolated miracle that happens to Jesus. It is something that happens to us—to Adam and Eve, to me, to the human family. As Jesus rises, the whole of humanity rises with him.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Because of him, the emptiness of death has been filled with God’s fullness.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“The message of the Bible is that death is not the end. Death does not defeat God’s promise. Death is not separation from God. In Jesus, God has dwelt among the dead. God has touched the very limits of our nature, from birth to death, in order to sanctify us and to unite us to God. The Living has embraced the dead. Death has been subsumed by life.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“The Son of God heals our nature by joining it to himself. Human nature is changed by this union. Mortality joins hands with immortality. The grave becomes the beginning of life.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“We read the Gospels not only with our minds but also with our lives.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Only a God who is totally free and totally sovereign can relate to the world with total love, patience, and generosity.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Origen pointed out that the way of Jesus doesn’t really need any defense. He wrote: Jesus is always being falsely accused, and there is never a time when he is not being accused.… He is still silent in the face of this and does not answer with his own voice. But he makes his defense in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges.38”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“That is how Isaac the Syrian imagines the world to come: not as two different places but as two different ways of responding to the love of God. “Those who are punished in hell,” Isaac writes, “are scourged by the scourge of love. For what is so bitter and vehement as the punishment of love?”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“The same class can be a delight for one student and a torment for another. One is excited; the other is bored. Both students are in the same place, and both are listening to the same teacher. But one is in heaven and the other is in hell.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Some early Christian teachers suggested that heaven and hell might in fact be the same place.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“Because Jesus is the universal Lord, all worldly power is limited and provisional.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“As Gregory says to the slave owner, “you have forgotten the limits of your authority.” The world has only one Lord—and this Lord “does not enslave,” but “calls us to freedom.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“In baptism nobody is invited to come up with their own personal statement of belief. All are invited to be immersed into a reality beyond themselves and to join their individual voices to a communal voice that transcends them all.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism

“In the same way, Christians today are often suspicious of creeds. Many churches are more comfortable with mission statements than with creeds. The thing about a mission statement is you always get to make it up for yourself. It’s like writing your own wedding vows. But here’s the paradox. It is the individualized confession, like the personalized wedding vow, that ends up sounding like an echo of the wider society.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism