I believe in God

The Text

The first word of the Latin creed is Credo — “I believe.” Everything that follows is governed by this verb, and the verb is in the first person singular. The creed is a confession, not a proposition; a speech-act, not a textbook entry. The act of saying it is part of what it means.

Translation Notes

The Latin construction credo in + accusative is grammatically unusual. Classical Latin credo normally takes the dative (to believe someone, to trust them) or accusative + infinitive (to believe that something is the case). The construction credo in Deum — literally “I believe into God” — is a Christian Latin coinage, modeled on the Greek pisteúō eis + accusative used in the New Testament (John 3:16; Acts 16:31).

The shift from dative to in + accusative carries theological weight. Augustine articulates the distinction in Tractates on John 29.6:

It is one thing to believe him (credere illi), another to believe him (in the sense of accepting that he exists, credere illum), and another to believe in him (credere in illum). To believe him is to believe what he says is true; to believe him is to believe that he himself is God; to believe in him is to love him.

The creed reserves credo in for the three Persons of the Trinity. After the third article, when the creed turns to the church, the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, the in is dropped: we believe these realities exist and are trustworthy, but we do not direct our faith into them as we direct it into God. To say “I believe in the holy catholic Church” in the same sense in which we say “I believe in God” would be, in the older Western reading, idolatry.

Most modern English translations cannot reproduce this distinction — “in” does double duty in English — but the Latin and Greek originals make it sharp.

The word credere itself is etymologically cor-dare, “to give one’s heart.” It is not, in the older sense, primarily an intellectual transaction. The Reformation distinction between notitia, assensus, and fiducia — knowledge, assent, and trust — preserves this layered meaning.

Historical Context

The “I” of the Apostles’ Creed is a baptismal “I.” The creed grew out of the threefold baptismal interrogation of the early Roman church, attested in Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition (early 3rd c.):

Do you believe in God the Father almighty? — I believe. Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God…? — I believe. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Church, and the resurrection of the flesh? — I believe.

Each “I believe” was answered by an immersion. The creed in declarative form (Credo) emerges from this interrogative form (Credis?) over the 4th and 5th centuries, but the first-person singular voice is original to it. The creed is the form of confession the baptizand uses to enter the visible church — and the form the baptized return to whenever the church gathers.

This is why the first-person plural (“we believe”) that became standard for the Nicene Creed in conciliar contexts was not taken up for the Apostles’ Creed. The Apostles’ Creed is the older, more catechetical form, the one each Christian speaks at their own baptism. The Nicene Creed is the form the council speaks for the universal church.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, Rufinus

The patristic consensus treats credere as a unified act of intellect and will, with a strong volitional core. Augustine’s distinction between credere Deo, credere Deum, and credere in Deum (above) sets the pattern. Faith is not first an intellectual operation that is then loved into trust; it is from the beginning a movement of the whole person toward God.

Strengths

• Holds together what later traditions tend to separate (intellect, will, affect)
• Stays close to the biblical idiom of faith as trusting attachment

Weaknesses

• Vague about what the content of faith is, in distinction from the act of faith
• Less precise than the scholastic refinements that follow

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq. 1–4

Aquinas distinguishes the act of faith from the virtue of faith. The act is the assent of the intellect to revealed truth — but an assent commanded by the will under the impetus of grace. Faith differs from opinion in its firmness and from knowledge in that its object exceeds what reason can demonstrate. The formal object of faith is the First Truth (veritas prima), God himself in his self-revealing.

Strengths

• Maintains the necessity of grace
• Gives precise theological vocabulary to the relation between faith, hope, and love

Weaknesses

• Intellectualizes faith in a way that can underplay the affective and existential dimensions
• The fides quae / fides qua distinction (the faith that is believed vs. the faith by which we believe), while clarifying, can also pry them apart

Reformation — Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.2; Heidelberg Catechism Q.21

Calvin defines saving faith as “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” The Heidelberg Catechism (Q.21) brings the three Reformation elements into formal balance:

True faith is a sure knowledge whereby I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in his Word. At the same time it is a firm confidence that not only to others, but also to me, God has granted forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness, and salvation, out of mere grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits.

The structure is: notitia (knowledge), assensus (assent), and fiducia (trust) — but the third is where saving faith actually lives.

Strengths

• Names trust as the central element clearly
• Pastoral: the catechism’s “to me” addresses the existential question of personal assurance

Weaknesses

• The threefold structure can suggest a sequence (first know, then assent, then trust) that pastoral experience rarely matches
• Strong on the fiducia of justified individuals; less clear on faith’s communal and ecclesial form

Modern

Tradition: Schleiermacher, Tillich, Hauerwas

Modern accounts of faith have ranged widely. Schleiermacher located faith in the “feeling of absolute dependence” — moving the center from intellectual assent toward religious experience. Tillich called faith “ultimate concern” — the orientation of one’s whole life toward what one takes to be ultimately real. Hauerwas and others have pushed back, retrieving faith as a practice formed in a community: faith is what the church does together over time, not a private interior state.

Strengths (taken together)

• Recover dimensions of faith — affective, existential, communal — that scholastic and Reformation accounts can underemphasize
• Respond seriously to modern challenges where bare intellectual assent has become hollow

Weaknesses

• Schleiermacher and Tillich can drift toward locating faith in the believer rather than its object
• The practice-centered turn risks losing the propositional content the creed actually requires

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s account of faith is one of the most carefully worked out of any English-speaking theologian, and it is concentrated specifically on this opening clause. His Aldersgate experience (May 24, 1738) is the experiential center: hearing Luther’s preface to Romans read aloud, Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” and trusted for the first time, by his own account, that Christ had died for him.

What Wesley took from this experience — and worked out doctrinally for the next fifty years — is the distinction between the faith of a servant and the faith of a son. The servant believes God exists, fears him, and obeys; the son trusts God and is conscious of being loved. Wesley made room for both in the ordo salutis: the servant’s faith is real faith, not unbelief, and God does not despise it. But it is not yet the assurance of pardon. Saving faith, for Wesley, is the trustful adherence by which the believer rests on Christ alone for justification, and it is normally (though not invariably) accompanied by the witness of the Spirit attesting that one is a child of God.

Wesley’s sermon “Salvation by Faith” (1738) is the load-bearing exposition. His Notes on Hebrews 11:1 — “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” — gloss faith as “a divine elenchos (proof, evidence) of things unseen.” His sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation” (1765) tightens the relation between faith, justification, and sanctification.

The practical Wesleyan posture: to say “I believe in God” is to claim the faith of the son when one can, and the faith of the servant when one cannot — refusing to call either one unbelief, while never resting in the servant’s faith as if it were enough.

Hymnody

Charles Wesley’s “Father, I stretch my hands to thee” (1741) is the lyrical counterpart to John’s prose on faith. “No other help I know; / If thou withdraw thyself from me, / Ah! whither shall I go?” — faith here is not the intellectual operation of assenting to propositions about God but the desperate reaching of a person toward the only object that can hold them. The hymn dramatizes credo in: it goes into God, not merely about God.

“And can it be that I should gain” (1738), Charles’s account of his own conversion, makes the same point in the opposite mood: the joy of having been laid hold of by the very God whom one had been seeking. The hymn’s celebrated line — “No condemnation now I dread; / Jesus, and all in him, is mine” — gives a singer’s voice to the Heidelberg Catechism’s “to me.”

The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists puts these and others under “Believers Rejoicing” and “For Believers Praying” — a recognition that the creed’s “I believe” is not a once-for-all settled act but a returning to faith, day by day.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first thing to notice about “I believe in God” is that it is a transitive sentence. Credo takes an object. The believer is not affirming that they have faith generally, that they are spiritually inclined, that they are open to mystery. The believer is saying they have given their heart to this — to the God named in the lines that follow. The English “I believe in God” can drift toward the intransitive sense (I am a believing kind of person); the Latin and Greek cannot.

This matters in the contemporary spiritual landscape. “I’m spiritual but not religious” is an intransitive faith — a faith with no object, or with a vague one. It is not the faith of the Apostles’ Creed. Calvin’s image — that the human heart is an idol factory — is the diagnosis the creed presupposes: left to ourselves, we will believe in something, but not necessarily in God. The creed is the church’s discipline against that drift. It names the object.

1 John 4 puts it bluntly: test the spirits — whether they are from God. The creed is one of the church’s oldest tests. To say “I believe in God” in this baptismal first-person singular is to declare, with the church across two thousand years, that one’s faith has this object and not another.

There is an everyday word, in English, for what credo means. The closest etymological relative is credit — third person (“she or he believes,” extending trust on the strength of a promise). Most people encounter credo more often in financial form than in religious form. The pastoral question follows: what do we extend our credo to, in practice? In what economy do we trust? Ezekiel speaks against extracting interest from the poor in the starkest possible terms (Ezek. 18). The creed and the prophet are not on different topics. The faith we extend to the Father almighty is the faith we are not extending to other masters.

For pastors: the line gives permission. It does not require certainty; it requires that the heart be given, however haltingly. Wesley’s faith-of-a-servant category — the believer who fears God and obeys but cannot yet feel themselves loved — covers many in the pews this morning, and Wesley named it as real faith. The line still belongs to them.

Further Reading

• Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition (early 3rd c.) — the baptismal interrogations
• Augustine, Tractates on John 29.6 — the credere Deo / Deum / in Deum distinction
• Rufinus of Aquileia, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed (c. 404)
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures V (on faith)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq. 1–4
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.2
• Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 21
• John Wesley, Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith” (1738)
• John Wesley, Sermon 43, “The Scripture Way of Salvation” (1765)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Hebrews 11:1
• Charles Wesley, “Father, I stretch my hands to thee” (1741); “And can it be” (1738)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780), section “For Believers Rejoicing”
• Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith §3–4
• Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, 1983) — on faith as a community-formed practice