Entering the Orthodox Church · Lesson 12 of 20
What Does “I Believe” Mean?
The Creed opens in the first person — “I believe” — because faith must be personal. Yet the fathers of the councils wrote “we believe,” because the confession belongs to the whole Church, recited together at the Liturgy. Both are true at once: the faith of the Church, made my own.
And what is this faith? A revelation. We did not discover the truth about God; Christ revealed it — to the prophets in the Old Testament, to the Apostles and saints in the New, when He became man. Metropolitan Hierotheos describes two degrees of faith: faith from hearing, when we accept the experience of the saints who have seen; and faith from vision, when — by striving to purify our hearts — we come to confirm the revelation ourselves. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” [Matthew 5:8]. It is like science: students first accept the discoveries of those before them, then repeat the experiments and confirm them personally. The saints are the researchers of the Kingdom, and their unanimous testimony is the Church’s data.
What Does “One God… the Father Almighty” Confess?
“In one God”: the Church does not believe in many independent deities. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three gods; the Three have one essence, while being three distinct Persons. Human reason cannot compass this — it is known by revelation, and personally by those who have been granted to see God. A careful analogy: all human beings share one common nature — body, soul, reason — yet are different persons. So, with due caution, the Three Persons share one nature and essence, each with His particular attributes.
“The Father”: the First Person is called Father because He begot the Son — before the creation of the world, and therefore before time itself, which was created along with the world. The Son is begotten outside time, before all ages; and the Father never existed without the Son and the Holy Spirit.
“Almighty” — Pantocrator: God upholds the universe. He is not like a watchmaker who builds a watch, winds it, and abandons it to run on its own. He governs the world personally and continually. Creation was brought out of nothing — and it cannot fall back into nothing, because God’s energy sustains it at every moment.
What Is the Invisible Creation?
God made “heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible” — the heavenly bodies, the earth and everything on it, and also what no eye can see. The angels belong to the invisible creation: liturgical spirits who minister for man’s salvation, arrayed in nine orders — Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Authorities, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. They are not legend: the shepherds at Christ’s Nativity saw them and heard their praise; Isaiah beheld them in the temple; and saints who purified their hearts — like Saint Spyridon, who heard the angels responding at his Liturgy — have known their presence.
The demons also belong to the invisible world. They were created good angels; through pride, desiring greater glory, they fell and became evil spirits. They hate man and labor by thoughts and every other means to draw him from God. But the catechumen should hear the good news in this teaching: before the Incarnation the demons held great authority — and they lost it. Since Christ became man, every Christian can overcome them by the power of Christ.
Where Does Man Stand in Creation?
At the summit. God first created the noetic spirits, then the sensible world, and finally, on the sixth day, man — who alone unites both, having soul and body. Man is a microcosm of the whole world, the recapitulation of creation, God’s most perfect creature. He was placed in Paradise, in communion with God; through the devil’s instigation and his own consent he disobeyed, lost grace, and corruption and death entered his life — and it was from that death and that tyranny that Christ delivered him by becoming man.
One more teaching hides in this article of the Creed, aimed at an ancient error with modern echoes: some heretics taught that a lower god made this world, and blamed the world’s evil on its inferior maker. The fathers answer: the Father created all things through the Son in the Holy Spirit, and made them “very good” [Genesis 1:31]. Evil is not part of creation’s design; it is an interloper and a parasite — like a growth on a tree that has nothing to do with the tree’s nature — entering through the fall of free creatures. The world is good; its disorder is not its truth; and its Maker has not abandoned it.
This article is drawn from Entering the Orthodox Church by Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, a guide to the catechism and baptism of adults, and is part of a series presenting its teaching.
