The Creed

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.

Background and Historical Setting

The Apostles’ Creed is the simplest and most widely used of the catholic creeds — the church’s baptismal confession, learned by catechumens and spoken at the font. Its legendary name, attached by the late fourth century, held that the twelve apostles each contributed a clause. The legend is not historical, but it preserves a real truth: the creed is a faithful summary of the apostolic preaching handed down in the church.

Its roots lie in the Old Roman Symbol (Latin Romanum), a baptismal confession in use at Rome by the second and third centuries. Interrogatory forms — “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?” — were put to candidates at baptism, who answered “I believe,” echoing the threefold name of Matthew 28:19. Over time the questions hardened into a declarative text. The familiar wording, the textus receptus, took its settled Latin form in Gaul by roughly the seventh or eighth century and spread throughout the Western church.

The creed is therefore a Western document. The Eastern churches confess the Nicene Creed rather than this one, and so the Apostles’ Creed has never been a point of East–West contention; it simply belongs to the Latin tradition the Reformation inherited. Its purpose was never controversy but catechesis: to give every believer, in a few lines, the whole shape of the faith into which they were baptized.

What It Guards Against

Though framed for instruction rather than debate, each article fences out error.

• “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” — against Marcion and the Gnostics, who severed the Creator from the Father of Jesus Christ and despised the material world. The one God is both Father and Maker; creation is good.
• “his only Son… conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary” — against any denial of Christ’s true deity or true humanity. He is the Father’s only Son (true God) and truly born (true man).
• “suffered… was crucified, dead, and buried” — against Docetism, which taught that Christ only seemed to have a body and only appeared to suffer. The verbs are blunt and physical: he really died.
• “the third day he rose again… in the body” — against any spiritualizing of the resurrection. The same body that was buried was raised.
• “the holy catholic church” — against schism and sectarian narrowing; the church is one and universal.
• “the resurrection of the body” — against the Greek contempt for the flesh that prized only the soul’s survival.

A Walk Through the Creed

The creed is built on the threefold name — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19) — with the longest article given to the Son, because in him the gospel is told.

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Faith begins with the Father, who is “almighty” (Gen. 17:1) and the Maker of all. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). His fatherhood is first toward the eternal Son, and then, by adoption in Christ, toward us (Eph. 1:5).

“And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” Jesus (Savior, Matt. 1:21), Christ (the anointed one), his only Son (John 3:16, the monogenēs, unique and eternally begotten), our Lord (the title of God himself, now confessed of Jesus, Rom. 10:9; Phil. 2:11).

“who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.” The incarnation: the eternal Son took true flesh by the Spirit’s overshadowing, without a human father, so that the holy child is the Son of God (Luke 1:35; Matt. 1:18–23). True God and true man in one person.

“suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” The gospel is nailed to history — a named Roman governor, a real cross, a real grave (Luke 23; 1 Cor. 15:3–4). “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24).

“he descended into hell.” His humiliation reached its lowest point. (Its meaning is treated under the Reformed Reading below.)

“the third day he rose again from the dead.” Death could not hold him (Acts 2:24). “He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:4). The resurrection is the Father’s vindication of the Son and the firstfruits of ours.

“he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” He was taken up (Acts 1:9–11) and enthroned (Ps. 110:1; Heb. 1:3), reigning now as Lord and interceding for his people (Rom. 8:34).

“from thence he shall come to judge the quick [living] and the dead.” He will return visibly to judge all (Acts 17:31; 2 Cor. 5:10). History has an end, and it is a Person.

“I believe in the Holy Ghost.” The third person, true God with the Father and Son, the giver of life and faith (John 14:26; 1 Cor. 12:3).

“the holy catholic church.” One holy universal people, gathered by the Spirit out of every nation (Eph. 4:4–6; Rev. 7:9).

“the communion of saints.” The fellowship of all believers in Christ and with one another, sharing in him and his benefits (1 Cor. 1:9; 1 John 1:3).

“the forgiveness of sins.” The heart of the gospel applied to us — full pardon through Christ’s blood (Eph. 1:7; Acts 10:43).

“the resurrection of the body.” Not the soul’s survival only, but the raising of the body in glory (1 Cor. 15:42–44; Phil. 3:21).

“and the life everlasting. Amen.” The end of all God’s purposes — eternal life with him (John 17:3; Rev. 21:3–4). “Amen”: so it is, and so may it be.

Key Doctrinal Points

• One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the Trinitarian frame of all Christian faith.
• The Father is both Creator and Father; creation is good and is his.
• The Son is truly God (“his only Son,” “our Lord”) and truly man (conceived, born, suffered, died, buried, raised in the body).
• The gospel is historical: real death under Pilate, real bodily resurrection, real ascension and reign, a real return to judge.
• The Spirit gathers a holy catholic church and a communion of saints.
• Salvation is the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.

Scriptural Foundation

• Matt. 28:19 — “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” — the Trinitarian shape of the whole creed.
• 1 Cor. 15:3–4 — “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day” — the second-article gospel in seed form.
• Luke 1:35 — the virginal conception by the Holy Spirit.
• Acts 1:9–11 — the ascension and the promise of return.
• Ps. 110:1; Heb. 1:3 — the session at God’s right hand.
• Acts 17:31 — God “will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.”
• John 3:16 — the only Son given, that we may have eternal life.
• 1 Cor. 15:42–44; Phil. 3:21 — the resurrection of the body in glory.

A Reformed Reading: Clarifications and Disputed Points

“He descended into hell.” This clause entered the Western text late (it is absent from the earliest forms) and has been read in several legitimate ways. (1) As a statement that Christ truly died and entered the state of the dead — “hell” rendering the Latin inferna / Greek Hades, the realm of the departed, not the place of torment. (2) As a literal descent of his soul after death, sometimes tied to 1 Peter 3:18–19, to proclaim victory (a reading common in the early and medieval church). (3) Calvin’s interpretation, which the Heidelberg Catechism follows: the descent describes the depth of Christ’s spiritual suffering — the anguish of bearing the wrath of God and the pangs of hell in our place, supremely in Gethsemane and in the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Heidelberg Q&A 44 puts it pastorally: that in my greatest temptations I may be assured Christ has delivered me from “the anguish and torment of hell.” A Reformed reader is comfortable confessing the clause and, with Calvin, finds its richest meaning in Christ’s enduring hell for us on the cross. None of the readings teaches a “second chance” for the dead or a place of purgation.

“The holy catholic church.” Catholic means universal — the whole company of the redeemed in every age and nation — and emphatically not “Roman Catholic.” The Reformed gladly confess the holy catholic church; we deny only that it is identical with, or governed by, the see of Rome. The true church is found wherever the Word is rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and discipline maintained (the Reformed marks of the church). Some Protestants substitute “Christian” for “catholic” when reciting the creed; this is a paraphrase of the meaning, not a correction of it — the older and better word is catholic, rightly understood.

“The communion of saints.” A treasured phrase, but to be read in line with Scripture. It means the real fellowship believers have with Christ and, in him, with one another — a sharing of spiritual gifts and mutual love and service (1 Cor. 12:7; Rom. 12:5). The Reformed reject the later accretion by which “communion of saints” came to license prayer to departed saints or trafficking in their supposed surplus merits. We commune with the saints; we pray to God alone, through the one Mediator (1 Tim. 2:5).

“The resurrection of the body.” Confessed in its plain sense against any reduction to mere immortality of the soul. Our hope is the redemption of the body (Rom. 8:23), the same body raised and transformed, conformed to Christ’s glorious body (Phil. 3:21). This guards the goodness of God’s material creation and the completeness of his salvation.

How the Reformed Standards Receive It

The Reformed churches receive the Apostles’ Creed as a faithful summary of catholic truth and expound it directly. The Heidelberg Catechism structures its entire treatment of saving faith around the creed (Q&A 22–58), walking article by article — its handling of the descent into hell (Q&A 44) and of the catholic church (Q&A 54) is classic Reformed exposition. The Belgic Confession (Art. 9) appeals to the three catholic creeds, the Apostles’ among them, as agreeable to the Word. The Westminster Standards do not print the creed in the Confession itself, but it appears in the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms as an appended summary “of what we believe,” and the Confession’s chapters on God, Christ the Mediator, the church, and the last things expound the same faith. Throughout, the creed is honored as a subordinate standard — received because it summarizes Scripture, and always tested by it.

Christ and the Gospel in the Creed

The second article is the longest by far, and that is the point: the creed is gospel-shaped. It does not merely assert that Christ exists; it tells his story — conceived, born, suffered, crucified, dead, buried, descended, risen, ascended, enthroned, returning. This is the apostolic kerygma in miniature (1 Cor. 15:3–8). Each verb is good news: he was born to be one of us, suffered in our place, died for our sins, rose for our justification (Rom. 4:25), ascended to plead our cause, and will come to gather his own. The first article gives us the Father who sent him; the third, the Spirit who applies him and the church in which his benefits — forgiveness, resurrection, everlasting life — are enjoyed. To confess the creed is to rehearse the gospel and to rest in the Christ it proclaims.

Questions for Reflection and Application

• Q: What comfort is there in confessing that Christ “descended into hell”?

Biblical answer: That in our deepest distress and assault, Christ has already borne the full weight of God’s wrath and the anguish of hell in our place — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46); “he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). Why it matters: It assures the troubled believer that no darkness they face is outside Christ’s victory; he has gone lower than our lowest, so we are never forsaken (Heb. 13:5).

• Q: When I say “the holy catholic church,” what am I confessing?

Biblical answer: One universal people of God drawn from “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9), “one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:4–5). Why it matters: It lifts the believer above sectarianism into the whole communion of the redeemed, and guards against confusing the universal church with any single institution.

• Q: Why does it matter that I confess the resurrection of the body, not just life after death?

Biblical answer: Because our hope is the redemption of the body (Rom. 8:23), sown perishable and raised imperishable (1 Cor. 15:42–44), made like Christ’s glorious body (Phil. 3:21). Why it matters: It honors the goodness of God’s creation and promises a salvation that reclaims the whole person — body and soul — not an escape from the body.

• Q: What does “the forgiveness of sins” mean for me today?

Biblical answer: Full and free pardon through Christ’s blood — “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Eph. 1:7); “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43). Why it matters: It places the gospel of grace at the center of personal faith and frees the conscience to walk in assurance rather than fear.

For Confession and Memory

The Apostles’ Creed is the church’s first lesson and the believer’s bedrock. It is short by design — meant to be known by heart, spoken at baptism, recited in family worship, and carried into the hour of death. Confess it standing with the congregation as your own “I believe,” and teach it to children line by line. Its brevity is its gift: in a few sentences you hold the whole faith — Father, Son, and Spirit; creation, redemption, and consummation — ready on the lips when no other words will come.

Further Reading

• Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 22–58 (the creed expounded article by article; the descent at Q&A 44).
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.16 (esp. on the descent into hell).
• Belgic Confession, Articles 9 and 27–29 (the catholic creeds and the marks of the church).
• Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, ch. on “He Descended into Hell?” (a careful survey of the readings).
• J. I. Packer, Affirming the Apostles’ Creed.
• Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism.