We all know the New Testament, and we all love it. It teaches us to know the Christ, and his work of salvation for us: his love for sinners, whether Jews or Gentiles.

For many, the Apostles’ Creed has a very different quality. It is from a later date, and ultimately it is only a human document. Protestants are inclined – no doubt as a reaction to the Roman Catholic view of tradition – to so distinctly separate Scripture and tradition that everything coming after the New Testament itself is regarded as a purely human product, and as such open to challenge. This may explain why so many are quite alert to what they regard as Scripture criticism, but far less alert to what may or may not be happening to our apostolic creed.

We often forget that the New Testament itself did not yet exist at the beginning. For century upon century, God’s people had lived by a book, the Law and the Prophets. These were the Scriptures that were read in every synagogue throughout the world. Moses set the standard, and the prophets gave hope. In this way, the people of God lived towards the future of the Anointed King, the Redeemer for all time. But when at last the time of fulfilment dawned, there was no new book. There was no Part Two. The New Covenant had no written beginning; the New Testament was not yet there. The New Covenant began with the apostolic tradition and the apostolic confession. It was not till later that the New Testament Scriptures came into existence. The thesis of this article is that the Christian tradition preceded the New Testament, and that the New Testament was built upon this tradition. The writings of the apostles and prophets are founded upon the rock of the apostolic confession.

1. John the Baptist⤒🔗

The beginning of the Gospel, we read in Mark 1:1-4, was John the Baptist. He appeared in the wilderness. All the people went out to hear him, and many of them were baptized in expectation of the coming – in judgment and in forgiveness – of the Lord himself.

Of all the prophets, John the Baptist was the greatest. Greater than Isaiah, greater than Daniel. Still, there was no book that was ever named after him. There was never a document with the title “The prophecies of John the Baptist”. For Islam, Mohammed is the great prophet, and his greatest legacy is the Koran. But the great prophet of the Messiah left us no book of his prophecies. For a moment, Luke 3:1 seems to be the beginning of such a book. The words we read there are reminiscent of the opening sentences of some of the books of the prophets:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar – when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene – during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.

However, after this introduction, all that follows is the narrative of John’s appearance, and a recount of his message to the crowds. Why is there no book now? Why is there no written record of the prophecies of this, the greatest of all prophets? Because all other prophets pointed forward to the Messiah, but John pointed him out.

All other prophets looked into a misty future, and attempted to decipher what they saw (see 1 Peter 1:10-12) but John sees the Lamb of God standing before him, clearly and as large as life, and points him out (John 1:29-34). The reality of the Messiah has overtaken the book. John is not standing in the Bible; he is standing in the wilderness, and the Lamb of God is right there with him. The Word has become flesh: there is nothing more for John to write. Now that the Promised One has come, the prophets can put their pens down!

2. Jesus of Nazareth←⤒🔗

Just as we have no book ascribed to John the Baptist, there is no book bearing the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is no less remarkable. Moses wrote down the Law, after God himself had first inscribed the two stone tablets. But Jesus wrote nothing. Once, in the synagogue of Nazareth, he read aloud from the Scriptures, but immediately afterward he closed the book, sat down, and began to speak: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). You can close your Bibles now: reality has arrived.

We only read of one time that Jesus wrote, and even then he did not appear to be really there: while the accusers of the adulterous woman stood waiting impatiently for Jesus’ judgment, he bent down and started to write on the ground with His finger. Whatever he wrote in the dust that day has long ago been erased.

Jesus doesn’t write: he comes, he is there, he calls the crowd together. On this mountaintop there is no thunder, no tablets of stone are brought down from on high to the people. Instead, on this mountaintop the Sermon on the Mount comes directly to the crowd, present and nearby. It comes from the mouth of him who had come down to this multitude. The Messiah doesn’t write: he teaches, and he leads his disciples. The same is true after his resurrection, when he goes before his disciples into Galilee.

Why should he write? At his ascension, he assures us that he is with us always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

Moses and the prophets wrote, because there was something for them to pass on. There was a distance to be bridged. Jesus does not write: he is with us forever. He did not leave us as orphans. His Spirit has come to live in our hearts.

3. The Writing of the Spirit in Our Hearts←⤒🔗

By his Spirit, Christ has written us very special letters. Letters, not written from a distance with pen and ink, as the Law and the prophets were, but letters written close at hand, written by the Spirit of the Living God. They were not written on stone or paper, but upon our human hearts. The Spirit of Christ has written the name of God upon the hearts of converted believers. He causes them to be born anew. Converted Christians are the Spirit’s trail of ink upon the pages of this world.

As much as Paul was a writer of letters, he understood only too well that his real work was to mediate this Spiritual writing in human hearts. In a letter to the Corinthians he writes:

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.2 Corinthians 3:3

After Pentecost, it was not a new book that went out into the world: it was the Spirit himself who went out to Israel and the nations. And the trail left by the apostles consisted of people who had been called into life “through the word of truth, to be a kind of firstfruits of all that he created” (James 1:18).

The New Testament church came into existence without a New Testament!

4. Recorded – lest we forget←⤒🔗

That which we call the New Testament today is a collection of documents that we could describe as ‘commemorative literature’. In his first Apologia, Justin Martyr calls the Gospels the ‘memoirs’ (apomnèmoneumata) of the apostles (66,3; see also his Dialogue with Tryphon, 100,4). These are the commemorative works of the apostles. Books to remember, not what had been written, but what had happened. Books about John and Jesus. Everything we know about John the Baptist and about Jesus himself, we know, not from themselves, but from others! It was the apostles who heard and saw and preached (1 John 1:1-5): and afterwards they wrote it all down, lest we forget!

That which was passed on through Peter was committed to writing by his son Mark. The witness of Matthew among the Jews concerning the coming of the Messiah was written down when he left Palestine to go abroad. It is not till the end of his life that John records some of the things he remembered, the truth of which is attested to by other witnesses (John 21:24-25). And in order to confirm what he has already heard, Theophilus receives from Luke a carefully researched written report.

In short: the Gospels were written later, as a commemoration and confirmation of the apostolic preaching of the Gospel.

In Surinam (the former Dutch colony in South America) there are homes that are built upon square stone foundation poles. The homes of people are visibly founded upon sturdy columns. That is also the way it is with the Gospel: it is firmly founded upon the witness of the apostles. We may live in communion with the Spirit of Christ, but our house stands on the foundation of the apostles. We have no writings of John the Baptist, no book of Jesus. All we have is the documents, the commemorative writings of the apostles and the elders, the leaders and the brothers of Jesus. But these eyewitness accounts are our guarantee: the Gospel of the Messiah, the Son of God, is trustworthy, and deserving of full acceptance.

5. The New Testament: an Answer to Prayer←⤒🔗

The New Testament, as we have it, is a varied collection of apostolic writings. It is a collection of history books, letters, and a revelation. How, then, should we characterize this broad whole? All kinds of attempts have been made to describe and characterize this collection of documents. We are well acquainted with the description of the New Testament as an uncovering of what is still hidden in the Old. With respect to its content, this collection of books is one of fulfilment.

Another description takes its point of departure in the authors. One could say that here we find the assembled inheritance of the apostles, the normative charter of Christianity, the canon. In recent centuries, many New Testament scholars have increasingly challenged these descriptions. These scholars describe the New Testament as an arbitrary collection of early Christian literature, the alluvial deposit of a new form of religiosity, precipitated around an impressive historical figure. These scholars see the New Testament as no more than a manifestation of human beliefs: Holy Scripture has lost its normative character; it is all tradition, and no more.

I would like to ask your attention for a different characterization: in the first place, the New Testament is uniquely an answer to prayer. It is the divine answer of the prayer the Son directed to the Father.

In the last night before he was crucified, Jesus prayed for his apostles and disciples. First – as we read in John 17 – he prayed for those the Father had given him, those to whom he had revealed the Father. They were to be sent out into the world, so that others would believe in him through their message.

That especially is why Jesus prays that they might be one (v.11): after all, his intent is that the world might believe that the Father had sent the Son. For the sake of so many, right into the 21st century, Jesus expressly prayed that the apostles might be one after his departure.

There was a real need for this prayer. At that time, all of Jesus’ disciples still rejected the idea that Jesus was to be crucified. And in the preceding few months there had been raging quarrels between them. And all this while their Master was still with them! Prospects for future unity seemed quite bleak. And that is why Jesus prayed for their unity in faith. Were it not for that prayer, we might never have heard anything more about the Father and the Son. Or we might have been left with a scattered assortment of contradictory writings, arising from the mutual rivalry of Jesus’ past disciples. Then we would truly have to make do with no more than early Christian literature, with no more than tradition.

But Jesus’ prayer of that night was answered. At Pentecost, and afterward, this group of unwilling and quarrelsome apostles was forged into a strong unity. The book of Acts bears witness to that: in widely varying circumstances, the apostles Peter and Paul preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel. And in Galatians 2 we read how Peter, James, and John extend the hand of brotherly fellowship to Paul and Barnabas. They may have different fields of labour: the Gospel unites them with each other and with Jerusalem.

The greatest marvel is that all the apostles, except for a few minor and temporary differences, remain fully united, even to the point of martyrdom. From Jerusalem, their paths went off into all directions, but it was always one Gospel and one faith.¹ More than anything else, the New Testament is uniquely an answer to prayer.

6. The Groundwater of the Apostolic Faith←⤒🔗

There is, however, something quite striking about the New Testament. In it we find the apostolic Gospels as windows on the Saviour’s work; we read about the preaching of these apostles in the book of Acts. Other than that, we only have documents written for particular circumstances, letters addressed to specific people or groups of people. Letters that were written in concrete situations . Anyone who reads the New Testament today can easily discover what the apostles and elders wrote in their letters. But what did they believe? What united them?

The New Testament letters provide no direct answers to these questions. Letters are not creeds, or confessions of faith. Neither are they statements of principle, or common manifestos. But the apostles would not have been able to address, with full conviction, specific circumstances in the various churches, if they could not draw on universal and consistent prior convictions: common ground that they shared with those to whom they wrote. It is this shared, common faith that enables the apostles to encourage, exhort and admonish. A short sharp letter, written by Jude for a specific occasion, presupposes “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (v.3). And Simon Peter knows that he and all of his readers have received the same ‘precious faith’ (2 Peter 1:1).

This community of faith does not exist just between the apostles and their readers. It is also shared among all the apostles and prophets that lived during the apostolic period. Peter writes about “the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Saviour through your apostles (2 Peter 3:2).

Behind all those letters, behind all the apostles, stands this common tradition, a tradition on which Paul also draws. Concerning the most important things that he has preached in Corinth, he writes: “…what I received I passed on to you as of first importance…” (1 Corinthians 15:3, see also ch. 11:2, 23). It is not just the churches that must hold fast to “the sacred command that was passed on to them” (2 Peter 2:21); the leaders of the churches too have no other task than to “guard what has been entrusted to (their) care” (1 Timothy 6:20). One day, they will have to give an account of the way they did that (Hebrews13:17). It is precisely for this reason that the apostles wrote letters, and travelled from church to church. They were shepherds who were called to feed their flocks (1 Peter 5:1-4; Acts 20:18-35). From the very beginning, the ‘apostles’ teaching’ was the instruction of “Peter, (who) stood up with the Eleven” (Acts 2:14, 42).

Very early in its history, the Church began to express this common apostolic faith in the words of the Creeds: the Apostles’ Creed summarizes this faith in 12 statements. One faith, shared by twelve apostles!

This Apostles’ Creed, while drawn up at a later date, aims to function as a uniformly articulated standard for all the letters: this was the point of departure for all the apostles whenever they wrote their pastoral advice and admonition. This is the point of view that unlocks for later readers all the lines of sight in the landscape of the apostolic letters.

Beneath the surface of their letters lies the groundwater of the apostolic faith. As Christians, we search for the groundwater of these letters, and we discover that they flow from the wellspring of Christ and the Spirit. Once, the apostles learned to accept Christ with a true faith: now, ‘streams of living water’ flow from within them (John 8:38). The contents of the Apostles’ Creed (the 12 articles) are not a ‘later product’ of the church: they are an expression of what lay at the foundation of all the apostolic writings. The apostles, when they wrote their letters, simply echoed and affirmed the Gospel that Jesus Christ had taught them to accept. Together, the apostles are arrayed as a hedge of believers, between whom we walk whenever we enter through the door of the Gospel.

7. Summary and Conclusions←⤒🔗

To summarize, we can say that the supposed sharp distinction between the earlier New Testament, and a later tradition, which includes the Apostles Creed, does not conform to reality. The house of the New Testament rests upon the pillars of the apostolic tradition. Sometimes, this tradition can be discerned in the lines of the New Testament; more often, however, it can also be found between and behind these lines.

Conclusion 1←↰⤒🔗

In our time, most people accentuate what they themselves believe: the personal experience of faith, and one’s own understanding of what that faith is, often form the points of departure for dialogue. At the very least, there is a need for an addition here: my personal faith must agree with and build on the teaching and tradition of the apostles. Otherwise, it is no longer the catholic Christian faith; it can only be the transient experience of a passing sentiment in a particular age.

Conclusion 2←↰⤒🔗

In our day, the claim is often heard that our confession must connect to the contemporary questions of our own time. In this context, the expression ‘a growing confession’ is sometimes heard. The apostolic confession, however, did not spread in connection with and in response to the questions of its age; instead, it connected to the heavenly revelation through the Son, who came from above. It was expressed with increasing precision in order to defend it. To the Jews, this confession was offensive; to the Greeks, it was foolishness. For both, it was irrelevant. But what is irrelevant for men is relevant for God; in every age, it becomes relevant for all who accept the Gospel. This confession teaches us to analyse the so-called questions of our time, and often to unmask them. The preaching of Paul at the Areopagus cut across the Greek world-view and experience: they ‘spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas’ (Acts 17:21). To the Athenians, Paul’s preaching about the resurrection from the dead and the final judgment was quite irrelevant, and they sent him on his way. This, however, did not lead Paul to develop a ‘growing Gospel’, driven by the questions of his audience.

Conclusion 3←↰⤒🔗

The unity of Christians and the promotion of the true and living faith would be greatly served by a broader knowledge of the Apostles’ Creed in evangelical circles, and by a revived exposition and preaching of the Creed in Reformed churches. Since ancient times Faith, Commandments and Prayer were the three pillars of Christian liturgy, preaching and spirituality. In the Reformed tradition, these three pillars were brought together in the Heidelberg Catechism. Whoever fails to uphold honour the place of regular Catechism preaching, regular reading of the Ten Commandments, or regular use of the Lord’s Prayer, loses connection with this ancient foundation, and is exposed to the danger of restricting preaching and spirituality to the personal interests of the preacher or the narrower concerns of the congregation.

It is only upon the foundation of Peter the Rock that the church will remain invincible. Only this foundation will give it lasting relevance for a humanity that has lost its way, and within a divided Christendom.