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Credo: A Story of God Told with the Creed of Christians

Credo: A Story of God Told with the Creed of Christians

Last updated on: October 9, 2026 at 4:27 pm by Jack Hartjes

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Credo: A Story of God Told with the Creed of Christians 2026-10-09T16:27:14-06:00 Jack Hartjes

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About 10 years ago, I began to imagine a personal “Credo” that would be faithful to the traditional Creed of the Nicene Council, but with more in it. I wanted more of the Bible story. More of the history of the people who became the Jews. More of Jesus in his world and ours. Something of power and weakness and the powers that we worship in place of God. Of the tragedy of sin and loss and of God’s campaign to win the world back. Of flesh in its poverty and glory, decisively affirmed in the Incarnation but not easily heard in the Creed. More of the Spirit’s work and the time of the Church. Of God’s victory over the enslaving powers. More of the excitement of the “greatest story ever told.” And enough of the story to decide whether one likes it or not.

The Creed we recite in Church is such a story. Not just a list of things to believe. It’s a story in outline. It names the main characters and progresses from the beginning of all things to a cross-shaped climax to a “happily ever after” ending. “Credo” expands on that story element in the hope that one might more easily find oneself in the story.

Believing or not

Finding oneself in the Christian story seems to me the usual way that conversion or renewal of faith happens. It’s more heart than head, but the head often is faith’s defenders first recourse. In a weekly men’s discussion group at St. Raphael’s in my town, someone occasionally will say exactly why being an atheist is not smart. Usually it’s a variation of the argument for God as the great designer. I liked the example of the woodpecker. Apparently scientists have not been able to figure out how that tiny animal could bang its head so rapidly and forcefully against the trunk of a tree without knocking its brains out. You could also look at the way the fundamental constants of the universe amazingly seem to be precisely adjusted for life.

I’m not ready to pronounce on such scientific issues or their theological implications. Still, I’m pretty sure no man in that group believes in God because of woodpeckers. And I don’t think love, commitment, or belonging would follow very naturally from a scientific beginning like that.

Stories of God, God’s journey with the human race and each individual, taken from the Bible or someone’s personal experience, family celebrations of the liturgical year, and the ways we live our faith — these attract, excite, and hold people. Or leave them cold or turn them away. It depends on the tellers’ telling and the listeners’ listening.

Audiences

“Credo” has two audiences in mind. The first audience is the Christian who wonders about the Church’s recent teaching on social justice. How is that different from just being a good person? The traditional Creed doesn’t deal with questions about justice, but Jesus, in first-century Palestine suffering under the oppression of Roman rule, must have. Roman overlords and Judean collaborators wouldn’t have taken kindly to Jesus’ calling out the malfeasance of the high and mighty. As important as the cross is to our faith, so must be the words and actions of Jesus that got him there. Jesus wouldn’t have been able to avoid the day’s politics because he was, after all, human.

The second audience is atheists like ones I know personally, whom I gently tease by calling them some of God’s favorite people. Their story includes an acquaintance with and a commitment to social and ecological justice. Such a person might find a kindred spirit here and in Jesus himself.

Maybe that spirit could survive without the theological “trimmings.” But maybe not. A person might find, here too, an opening to questions of more than empirical bearing. Maybe the power that we worship to the point of slavishness has a beyond-scrutable hold on us, but the weapons of the weak just might win our freedom. Maybe the humbler virtues like giving and forgiving, repentance and thanksgiving move history more surely than the world’s self-interested exchanges, repayment in kind, an eye for an eye, and just deserts. Maybe we live best as if sensing a truth unknown to ordinary thinking and a story exciting enough to want music and dancing along with soul searching and, perhaps, change of heart and a new vision.

But that’s already getting into the story – into parts that I enjoyed writing the most.

Credo: A Story of God Told with the Creed of Christians

Credo, I believe in God,

who calls into life a world of delights and us, as God’s image, to watch over it

and powers that we exercise in freedom but also worship as slaves;

who accompanies us in harmony and confidence but also rivalry and discontent

when our enslaver gods lead us to lord over each other and the good Earth;

who chose a people, who would become the Jews, to be hope for this world,

where confidence could become vainglory and harmony give way to war;

then bore them and bore with them through adversity, defeat, and exile,

and their pining after lesser gods, having forgotten time and again

the one whose covenant would fit them for freedom with justice,

as their own Scriptures testify.

Credo, I believe in Jesus, God’s anointed, sent to free a world in thrall to the powers,

Son with Father in eternal glory and self-giving, mutually filling love,

but emptying himself, born in time of the flesh of this world,

child of a virgin and a lowly laborer, one of the underclass in a conquered race,

even a Nazorean, from where, as we liked to say, “What good can come?”

In such low estate and obedient to the one he taught us to call Father,

he made his own the concerns of all he met, Jew or alien, rich or poor,

respectable or rebel, oppressor or oppressed.

Rejected for putting God’s justice on earth above our fractious ways

and God’s reign (but not himself) above Roman and Temple authority,

tried for blasphemy, for dethroning our idols and ideologies, our favorite rulers,

for upending our hierarchies of blessed and cursed,

calling sinners forgiven, infirm saved, and those we reject favored,

and calling out the malfeasance of the successful and the mighty,

powerless, abandoned by friends and left alone by God, but faithful to the end,

for our salvation, he accepted from the arm of the world’s law and Pontius Pilate

a rebel’s, a no-account’s sentence. He was crucified, died, and was buried,

with all the fallen seemingly lost in the grave’s dark and silence.

But God raised him, victor in lowliness and suffering, according to the Scriptures,

seen again in his now-glorified body, touching, being touched once more.

And, God’s love for frail flesh made tangible in Jesus and in earthy, sacred signs,

he sits at the Father’s side, unseating the powers, powerless to hold him.

He will be with us in the Spirit to the ends of the Earth and the close of the age.

Then he will come in the flesh to hand over to the Father a world renewed

with all who, in humility and hope, accept adoption into God’s family

and refuse fealty to or despair under this age’s for-a-time rulers.

Credo, I believe in the Holy Spirit, with the Father and the Son equal in divinity,

life and fire dancing in the play and passion of Father and Son’s love,

who is accomplishing love’s purpose

within the three-person God,

between God and all the world,

and among the world’s creatures,

to enfold many in one, yet bless each one’s unique story;

who inspires the Scriptures of Jews and Christians,

who works in the stories, songs, dances, and traditions of many peoples,

who speaks through prophets of each age,

who gives us new life as once to Jesus’ friends in their bereavement and shame,

who leads us on varied paths to God of many names, always in Jesus’ embrace.

Bidden by that Spirit, I believe with the Church, the saints on earth and in heaven;

with prophets, apostles, and martyrs; with teachers, encouragers, and lovers;

and with the ones who gave me life, Dave, Rose Marie and all my forebears.

Wounded by sin, they knew Jesus’ healing touch in life and sacrament,

and they passed that touch on to their world and to me.

I mean to serve the mission Jesus gave the Church when he breathed his Spirit on us,

to draw all people to the life-giving waters of Father, Son, and Spirit’s love;

to tell the story where every good, of nature or human making, is gift,

and sin a failure to return thanks;

to own only our poverty and the needs of our human and natural companions

and the unlooked-for blessings that bear us up amid trials and stumbling

and the fleeting, gracious foretastes of the world made finally right;

to do all, by grace, for that new Kingdom of God, already begun, yet to come,

and for the love of family, friend, stranger, and enemy,

secure in the armor of God and strong with the weapons of the weak;

and to look forward, past joys and griefs, successes and failures, to God’s reign

over all the powers of nature and humanity, heaven and earth.

I see a new age coming when the joys of giving preside over dealing’s prospects

and when the green, creative freedom of being forgiven and forgiving

corrects the dry, confining mechanisms of fate or karma or just deserts.

I imagine an ending to the story of this age where no earthly good is lost in eternity,

where flesh is saturated with heaven, Earth’s promise of beauty fulfilled,

her peoples freed, her powers righted, her tragedy vanished away.

I hold closest the favor of being here now, flesh amid flesh, ordained one day to awake

to life with God, sisters, brothers, the world forever growing in love and delight.

That I may grow in faith, hope, love, and delight.

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