Interpretation of The Symbol of Faith-A5

Interpretation
of
The Symbol of Faith

Interpretation of
The Symbol of Faith

by
Vladimir Lossky, archbishop Peter (Paul L’Huilier)
translated from Russian by Mihail Chipitsyn

Content
Creed, The Symbol of Faith.............................................. 1
Introduction ....................................................................... 3
The First Element ............................................................ 10
The Second Element ........................................................ 14
The Third Element .......................................................... 20
The Fourth Element ........................................................ 26
The Fifth Element ............................................................ 31
The Sixth Element ........................................................... 36
The Seventh Element....................................................... 42
The Eighth Element......................................................... 49
The Ninth Element .......................................................... 56
The Tenth Element .......................................................... 62
The Eleventh and The Twelfth Elements ...................... 68

From translator
This Interpretation covers history of creation of the

Christian ‘rule of faith’ and presents it, element by element, in clear
and concise terms for any who is interested in what Ortodox
Christians believe in and confess. The Russian text was first
published in the periodic Orthodox ‘Journal of the Moscow
Patriarchy’ (Журнал Московской Патриархии) in 1969, #1 pp. 75-
79, #2 pp. 64-69, #3 pp. 65-71. Translator has taken the liberty to
add explanations for some words that could be incomprehensible for
a reader not acquainted with the Orthodox terminology; pictures of
mosaics, mentioned in The Seventh Element; and Greek and Latin
texts of Nicene-Constantinople Creed (Nicaeno-
Constantinopolitanum), discussed in the Introduction.
Mihail Chipitsyn, Cand.theol., Århus 2021

Vladimir Lossky, archbishop Peter Interpretation of The Symbol of Faith
Creed, The Symbol of Faith

The First I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker
Element of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and
invisible.
The Second And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the
Element only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all
ages. Light of light; true God of true God;
begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father,
by Whom all things were made;
The Third Who for us men and for our salvation came down
Element from Heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit
and the Virgin Mary, and became man.
The Fourth And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
Element and suffered, and was buried.
The Fifth And the third day He arose again, according to the
Element Scriptures,
The Sixth and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right
Element hand of the Father;
The Seventh and He shall come again with glory to judge the
Element living and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no
end.
The Eighth And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life,
Element Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the
Father and the Son together is worshipped and
glorified; Who spoke by the prophets.
1
The Ninth In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Element
The Tenth I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of
Element sins.
The Eleventh I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life
and The of the world to come. Amen.
Twelfth
Elements
2
Introduction
The Symbol of Faith is a solemn confession of the Christian
dogmas, which is read or sang under the liturgy, before the
Eucharistic canon. The first verbum of this holy text – believe – is
connected with every following member of The Symbol and
attaches to this expression of the commune faith of the Christian
people a character of personal participation and responsibility of
each member of the Church, who pronounces together with the
others ‘believe’, and later ‘confess’, ‘anticipate’/’look for’.
But is it enough to confess by lips alone - even if one does it
with all cordial veneration - without comprehending these words,
discovered by Church fathers, so that the truth, revealed by God,
become available for every human mind, enlightened by the faith in
Christ?
Great Orthodox theologian of the 19th century Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow marked the difference between faith as the
Truth revealed by God, and faith as a comprehensible acceptance of
the revelation. The blind adherence to the authority of the faith is
not enough for ‘possession of the faith’, according to St. Philaret.
He wrote that while our faith is dwelling on the Holy Scripture and
The Symbol of Faith, it belongs to God and His prophets, His
apostles, Church fathers, - it is not our authentic faith yet. But when
it is grasped by our thoughts, fastened in our memory, - then we
found it, then we possess it.
3
Hence, it is necessary to study all twelve elements of The

Symbol of Faith, so that words, which we hear under every liturgy,
could awake our thoughts and make us conscious members of the
Church of Christ.
Before we proceed with a study of the Christian dogmas,
which are expressed in The Symbol in a condensed form, lad us to
say some words about the history of this ‘rule of faith’, which had
been received by the Church through the power of universal
authority.
Before beginning of the 4th century, ‘symbols’, or short
formulae of the Christian faith, were generally connected with
baptism or catechesis1. This fact explains multiplicity and diversity,
dependent on the local practice of one or another church. Those
formulae of confessions, which newly baptised must pronounce at
the day of their baptism, were called ‘rules’, or ‘canons’ of the faith
in the 2nd century.
A new kind of The Symbol, which responded to the necessity
of precision of the definition of the Orthodox teaching as a
counterweight against teachings of the heretics, appears in the 4th
century. These symbols, accepted by universal councils, then were
not implicitly connected with the rite of baptism, but acquired more
essential meaning in the life of the Church.
The Nicene Symbol of Faith had been the first such dogmatic
symbol and it had been pronounced at the Universal Council of
Nicea (325). This ‘Baptismal’ Symbol of the local church –
1
A preparation process before baptism. (From translator)
4
probably Jerusalem church – was reworked by theologians, who had

to broaden it, so that the confession of Christ’s Divinity (aimed
against Arian 2 teaching) could be expressed more precise. This
Symbol has remained the universal authority at the Councils in
Constantinople in 381, in Ephesus (431), and in Kalchedon (451) as
the dogmatic confession of the faith.
Nicene-Constantinople’s Symbol of Faith, which is used in
our time, has common similarity with the previous Nicene Symbol.
Originally it was one of the expressions of the ‘Nicene Creed’ with
minutely described confession of Christ’s Divinity, which was born
after 370 out of baptismal Antioch-Jerusalem symbols. This
liturgical symbol was obviously redacted by Fathers of the Second
Universal Council of Constantinople in 381 for use under the
baptism without an intention to substitute the Nicene Creed. It was
announced together with the Nicene Creed at the 4th Universal
Council of Kalchedon as an officially accepted dogmatic formula,
and as such it was used in the liturgical practice of the Emperor’s
capital city.
By the end of the 5th century this Constantinople liturgical
Symbol of Faith was accepted as full and final definition of Nicene
Creed, which it finally substituted. It was expected to be accepted
universally as a true ‘rule of faith’, and it pressed all other Christian
2
Arius (ca. 250-336) was a priest and a theologian from Alexandria. Arianism is
called after Arius. His followers were called Arianists. Arianists clamed that the Son
was created by Father and as a consequence neither equal to Him nor eternal or
divine of nature. Arianism was judged as heresy at the Council at Nicea in 325, but
was influential for a long time before it was eradicated. Bishop of Alexandria
Athanasius was the major adversary against Arianism and in his conception the Son,
Christ, was a part of God’s essence and as such was not created. (From translator)
5
symbols out, baptismal and councils’ alike. The 6th Ecumenical

Council of Constantinople (680) confirmed the irreversible character
of the so-called Nicene-Constantinople Creed (Nicaeno-
Constantinopolitanum).
Symbolum Nicæno- Symbolum Nicaeno-

Constantinopolitanum3 Constantinopolitanum4
[The First Element]

Πιστεύοµεν εἰς Credo in
ἕνα θεὸν, unum Deum,
πατέρα, Patrem
παντοκράτορα, omnipotentem,
ποιητήν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, factorem coeli et terrae,
ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων. visibilium omnium et
invisibilium.
[The Second Element]

Καὶ εἰσ Et in
ἓνα κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, unum Dominum Jesum
Christum,
τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ τὸν µονογενῆ, Filium Dei unigenitum
τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθέντα et ex patre natum ante omnia
3
Peder Nørgaard-Højen, Den Danske Folkekirkes bekendelsesskrifter. Tekst og
oversættelse, ANIS, 2000 (Added by translator)
4
From the Missale Romanum (Added by translator)
6
πρὸ πάτρων τῶν αἰώνων, saecula,

φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine,
θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ θεοῦ Deum verum de Deo vero,
ἀληθινοῦ,
γεννηθέντα, οὐ ποιηθέντα, genitum, non factum,
ὁµοούσιον τῷ πατρί, δι᾽οὗ τὰ consubstantialem patri, per
πάντα ἐγένετο· quem omnia facta sunt:
[The Third Element]

τὸν δι᾽ἡµᾶς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους qui propter nos homines
καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡµετέραν σωτνρίαν et propter nostram salutem
κατελθόντα ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν descendit de coelis,
καὶ σαρκωθέντα ἐκ πνεύµατος et incarnatus est de Spiritu
ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου sancto ex Maria virgine
καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, et homo factus est;
[The Fourth Element]

σταυρωθέτα τε ὑπὲρ ἡµῶν ἐπὶ crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub
Ποντίου Πιλάτου Pontio Pilato,
καὶ παθόντα passus
καὶ ταφέντα et sepultus est,
[The Fifth Element]

καὶ ἀναστάντα τῆ τρίτη ἑµέρᾳ et resurrexit tertia die secundum
κατὰ τὰς γραφάς, scripturas,
7
[The Sixth Element]

καὶ ἀνελθόντα είς τοὺς et ascendit ad coelos;
οὐρανούς,
καὶ καθεζόµενον ἐκ δεξιῶν τοῦ sedet ad dexteram patris,
πατρός,
[The Seventh Element]

καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόµενον µετὰ δόξης et iterum venturus est in gloria
κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· iudicare vivos et mortuos,
οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται cuius regni non erit finis.
τέλος.
[The Eighth Element]

Καὶ εἰς Et in
τὸ πνεῦµα τὺ ἅγιον, Spiritum sanctum,
τὸ κύριον, Dominum
τὸ ζωοποιόν, et vivificantem,
τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορευό- qui ex patre filioque procedit,
µενον,
τὸ σὺν πατρὶ καὶ υἱῷ qui cum patre et filio simul
συµπροσκυνούµενον καὶ adoratur et glorificatur,
συνδεξαζόµενον,
τὸ λαλῆσαν διὰ τῶν προφητῶν. qui locutus est per prophetas.
[The Ninth Element]

Εἰς Et
8
µίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ unam, sanctam, catholicam et

ἀποστολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν. apostolicam ecclesiam.
[The Tenth Element]

Ὁµολογοῦµεν Confiteor
ἕν βάπτισµα εἰς ἄφεσιν unum baptisma in remissionem
ἁµαρτιῶν, peccatorum
[The Eleventh and The Twelfth Elements]

προσδοκῶµεν et exspecto
ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν καὶ ζωὴν τοῦ resurrectionem mortuorum et
µέλλοντος αἰῶνος. vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.
9
The First Element

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of
Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible.
God of the Christian revelation, God of the Holy Scripture,

who dwells in the faith of the Church’s Tradition, is not an
impersonal being, neither is He a faceless Absolut, indifferent to
human’s fate. Monotheism of the Christians is not the same one of
philosophers. And it is also different from monotheism of such
religious traditions as Judaism and Islam, who, while accepting the
living and personal God of the Old Testament, though do not admit
that this God as a Person is different from His perfect Essence and is
able, sort of speaking, to breach His solitude and become more than
one Person, bounded by His uniqueness. Completeness of the
revelation is the Property of the New Testament: Son of God
became a human and made us capable to receive the Holy Ghost,
which is emanating from the Father. One and personal God of the
Christianity is Trinity of Persons. That is why the resurrected Christ
sent His disciples to ‘[…] go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost […]’ (Matt 28:19). ‘Believe’ of the Church is a
disclosure of this Christian baptismal formula.
The primary element of The Symbol, where we confess faith
‘in one God’, relates to the First Person of the Holy Trinity, to the
Father, who is the personal beginning of the indivisible Divinity,
10
equally inherent to the Three Persons. All Three – the Father, the
Son and the Holy Ghost – are God; not ‘three Gods’, but a ’one
God’, one Essence, one substance, or the Nature in three Hypostases,
or Persons. Due to this perfect oneness of the Divine Being there is
not differentiation between Persons of the Holy Trinity other than in
forms (modi) of existence inherent to each of the Persons: not-birth
of the Father, birth of the Son, procession of the Holy Ghost. We
should add, that these personal properties establish a triple
connection, which, by allowing to differ between the Father, the Son
and the Holy Ghost, supposes to learn us to correlate positively each
Person to two others, and never separate them in our thoughts. So,
when we talk about the Father ‘the Almighty’ and ‘the Creator’, we
should not forget, that He had created everything through His Word
(John 1:3), and that the same creating power is inherent to the life-
giving Spirit (Job 33:4) as well.
Note, that the expression ‘the Almighty’ actually means ‘the
Lord of everything’, or ‘the God holding all the being’. Only God of
the Bible, who revealed His Name to Moses, when He said to him ‘I
AM Who I AM’ (Exod 3:14), He alone is ‘the Creator’ in the
absolute meaning of the word. The Creator of the being out of not
being. He is not ‘the Divine Artisan’, not ‘the Demiurge’, an
organizer of the eternal formless matter, of some kind of a before-
being Chaos. If God had created everything out of ‘nothing’, one
should not imagine that before world was created as a possibility for
the being, there had pre-existed some kind of ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’ is
not the beginning, which could be opposed to the perfect Being of
11
God. This expression gains meaning only in relation to the created

being, which has began to be without preliminary condition in
relation to this ‘beginning’ (Gen 1:1), but by the mighty will of God
alone. One should neither imagine that lack of the external
conditions obliges us to assume that God created everything ‘out of
Himself’, by a kind of emanation, or ‘exteriorization’. World is not a
flawed and diminished Divinity, but the absolutely new being,
called to life by the Creator, who’s creative initiative was not
dictated by any inner necessity. The act of Creation is an absolutely
free and donative act of God’s will, and not unconscious or
involuntary activity. Design of the Universe forces us to accept
goodness, wisdom and love of the Creator, Who filled the world
with meaning and gave it the higher purpose by subduing it to the
personal and free creatures, created ‘in the image of God’ (Gen
1:26-27).
The biblical expression ‘heaven and earth’ (Gen 1:1), which
means cosmos in its entirety - or everything that created by God and
exists - receives a separating connotation in the interpretation of the
Church Fathers, and points out the spiritual reality and the palpable
reality, the invisible world of ‘heavenly spirits’ and the visible world,
with which we are connected through biological conditions of our
earthly existence. We can clearly see that this distinction between
‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ does not lead to a necessity of admitting ‘a
geocentric’ cosmology. By the way, this ‘conflict between science
and religion’ in relation to this problem looks artificial. Really, we
do not expect to find the spiritual infinity of the created universe
12
through the exploration of the cosmic space. And more than that, it
is not the nuclear physics with its analysis of matter’s construction,
who gives us knowledge about the almighty energy of the Creator,
which conveys being ‘to all the visible and invisible’.
13
The Second Element

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-
begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of
light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one
essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made;
There is some apparent disproportion in the Creed: to the

only element concerning the First Person of the Holy Trinity there
are six elements concerning the Second Person. It can be explained
rather easily: confession into the one almighty God, Creator of the
universe, was common both for Judaism and Christianity, but there
is another matter, when we look at the person and mission of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Relation between God the Father and the Son raises first of
all the question about monotheism5: the New Testament clearly
states divinity of Christ (John 1:1), but it does not mean in any way,
that by this the strict monotheism is rejected. The Father and the Son
are one – this is revealed by God Himself (John 17:22), but the
different interpretation of this unity, different approaches to this
truth brought up fierce disagreements. There were offered two false,
or heretical, solutions to the problem. One belongs to Modalists,
who rejected any difference between the Father and the Son, another
belongs to Arianists, followers of Arius, who rejected absolute
divinity of the Son. On the other hand, the absolute reality of
5
believe in one God (From translator)
14
humanity in our Lord Jesus Christ raises the question of correlation

between human and divine in His Being. There were great debates
on this topic in the period after the redaction of the Creed, and the
Church had to specify with addition of new definitions – specially at
the Council of Ephesus in 431 and at the Council of Kalchedon in
451 – the content, already expressed in the Nicene-Constantinople
Creed.
We have to stress at this point that those elements of The
Symbol, which relate to the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ and His
mission, as well as definitions added by the following councils,
should not be interpreted as baseless deliberations, which, as one
would say, muddied the clarity of the evangelical message; for the
Church defends in these dogmas the most precious foundation of the
revelation from the New Testament – message of the salvation given
to humanity in Jesus Christ. That is, if Christ is not God and Human
in all reality and fullness, the abyss between the Divine and the
human is insuperable. We will discuss this question during
interpretation of elements related to incarnation and redemption.
Out of six elements of The Symbol related to the second
Person of the Holy Trinity the first defines the ontological, which
means eternal relation between the Son and the Father, other five
elements define Jesus Christ’s mission of world’s salvation.
The Church confesses in its second element of The Symbol
first of all oneness of the Son of God. By this it rejects the heretical
teaching about adoption, according to which, Jesus had been only a
human, adopted by God. Jesus Christ is God’s Son alone due to his
15
nature. When Christians became sons of God in Christ through

baptism – this does not abolish the fundamental difference between
not-created and created being. We become sons of God through
grace, Christ is Son of God in His nature. And precisely because
Christ is Son of God in His nature we are able to become God’s
children through grace.
By confessing the Son ‘begotten of the Father before all ages’,
we do not mean that this birth simply preceded creation, but we
confess that it is out of time, because notion of time is connected to
notion of being. That is why we read in The Gospels: ‘before
Abraham was born, I am’ (John 8:58), not ‘I was’, which would
point to the precedence in time. Notice that this definition of the
birth ‘before all ages’ was aimed against all blasphemous words of
Arianists about the Son: ‘there was time when He was not’.
The Son is ‘Light of light; true God of true God’, ‘He is the
TRUE God and eternal life’ (1 John 5:20) because, besides the
personal genesis (those personal qualities by which we are able to
differentiate between Persons of the Holy Trinity), these three
Divine Persons are completely identical, and Gregory of Nyssa
writes precisely about this: ‘If we confess unchangeable nature of
God, we do not reject difference between the Cause and the Causal,
and we comprehend only through this what the difference of the
One from the Other.’6 To express this absolute resemblance between
the Father and the Son, Apostle Paul tells us, that Christ is ‘…the
image of God…’ (2 Cor 4:4). In his letter to Hebrews the relation
6
Quod non sint tres dei. Migne. PG, t.45, col.133
16
between the Son and the Father is expressed in following words:

‘…the radians of God’s glory and the exact representation of His
nature…’ (Heb 1:3). One of Church Fathers of the 3rd century, St.
Gregory the Wonder-worker, bishop in Neocaesarea, outlined this
theology of the image in his creed beautifully and concisely: ‘One
God the Father of the living Word, of the hypostatic Wisdom and of
the eternal Power and Image; the Perfect, the Parent of the Perfect,
the Father of the only Son, one Lord, the Single of the Single, God
of God, Image and Likeness of the Divinity, the efficient Word, the
Wisdom that comprehend the meaning of everything and the
Creative Power of all being, the true Son of the true Father, the
Invisible of the Invisible, the Imperishable of the Imperishable, the
Immortal of the Immortal, the Eternal Being of the Eternal Being’7.
By the precision of these opening words of the second
element of The Symbol, the Church confesses always the Son as
‘begotten, not made’ to rebuke Arius and his followers, because the
eternal birth of the Son from the Father, as well as the procession of
the Holy Ghost, is the act of the Divine inner-Trinitarian life, which
has nothing common with the creation. It means, that it is not even
possible to draw an analogy between the birth of the Son from the
Father and the creation of the world, which is an act ad extra
(external) in relation to the Holy Trinity, because, as beautifully put
by St. Gregory of Neocaesarea: ‘There is nothing created or
7
PG, t.46, col.912
17
ancillary in the Trinity; nothing of the introduced, that was not there
before, but which became afterwards.’8
To get rid of any ambiguity once and for all, the Fathers of
the Universal Council of Nicea defined, that the Son is ‘of one
essence with the Father’. This concludes the previous definitions:
common eternity and equal divinity of the Divine Persons, their
absolute essential unity. The gravity of the definition was in the fact,
that it excluded any ambiguity. Heretics, as Arius and his followers,
used citations from the Holy Scripture, both by interpreting them
with seemingly plausible conclusions in favour of their theories, and
as son obscure formulae, which could be understood as ambiguous.
That is why, after necessary explanations, all teachers of the
Orthodox Church finally came to exactly this definition. Common
essence of the Divine Persons is one of the fundamental dogmas of
the true Christian teaching.
The Second element of The Symbol of Faith ends with the
statement, that everything was made by the Son. This is the echo of
the teaching, expressed in the New Testament (John 1:3; Col 1:16).
All, that became, is the creation of the three Divine Persons. Though
every one of them is the cause of the creation by particular, intrinsic
only to His way. If the Father is the primary Cause, and the Holy
Ghost is the improving Cause, then the Word can be called as the
acting Cause.
The Symbol does not tell about this extensively, but only
states the established in the Tradition confession by simple words:
8
ibid
18
‘by Whom all things were made’. This brevity has a simple
explanation: on the one hand, this dogma, which is revealed in The
Gospel, did not become an object of discussions; on the other hand,
The Symbol is the Creed of faith, and it should not harbour plain
speculative constructions, which, all their competence respected, can
not claim to be accepted as the rule of faith.
19
The Third Element

Who for us men and for our salvation came down from
Heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the
Virgin Mary, and became man.
If the Second Element of The Symbol of Faith tells about

the Son and His ontological and eternal relation to the Father, the
Third Element tells about His Incarnation.
Revelation of the New Testament solemnly proclaims that
the Messiah, who had been expected by Israel – the incarnated Word
of God – is at the same time a conclusion and overcoming of the Old
Testament. Prophets had clearly foreshadowed that the new epoch is
coming with Messiah, the Messenger of the Almighty. They even
described the image of that Messiah: in the book of prophet Isaiah
there is an image of a humiliated and offended Slave (Is 53). On the
other hand, the Hebrew theology, remaining faithful to the strict
monotheism, saw a kind of personification of the Divine Wisdom
(Prov 8-9; Eccl 1 and 24), but never brought together the person of
Messiah the liberator and the incarnated Divine Wisdom. Besides, in
the last centuries before our time there had been a flourish of the
exalted nationalism with a shade of xenophobia, which darkened the
universal vision of the Messiah of the Old Testament. For many the
expected Messiah was He, Who will re-establish the Hebrew state.
Even the apostles, up to the Pentecost, have not been able to free
themselves from such conceptions. (Acts 1:6).
20
The Third Element of The Symbol of Faith is an echo of

the evangelical statement: ‘The Word became flesh and made His
dwelling among us.’ (John 1:14). The Church defended with an
extra zeal the teaching about the Incarnation from those, who
rejected or distorted this truth, which substantiates certainty in our
salvation. We stressed under our explanation of the previous
element of The Symbol, how zealously the Church heralded about
perceiving Jesus Christ as true God and true human. Orthodoxy led
a fierce battle against Docetists9, who rejected in their mystical
dualism reality of the Incarnation. John the Theologian had precisely
them in mind in his First Letter, when he wrote: ‘By this you will
know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ
has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not
confess Jesus is from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist […]’ (1
John 4:2-3). In his Second Letter he also writes: ‘[…] many
deceivers have gone out into the world, refusing to confess the
coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Any such person is the deceiver
and the antichrist.’ (2 John 1:7). Hereby the Holy Scripture warns us
not only about the heresy of the Docetists, but about any pseudo
spirituality of any kind, which does not place at its centre the
teaching of Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.
9
Docetism (from Greek dokein/δοκεῖν – to seem) is the heretic teaching about
Christology, that Jesus was only apparently became human and as a consequence
only apparently suffered and died. Christ’s body was only an illusion, while Jesus
Himself was a pure Ghost. This teaching has distinct gnostic character, which
perceives everything physical as evil, that is why, according to their logic, God would
never assume a physical body and die physically. (From translator)
21
The Incarnation is an event that has no equal in the history

of salvation. It is the event that has transformed the history, because
through the Incarnation of the Word, relation between God and
humans have changed completely. In the Christian teaching the
notion of time is linear, not cyclic, that is, time has the beginning,
marked by the creation of the world, and the end, that will be
marked by the last Judgement. And in one place this straight line is
interrupted by the Incarnation. There is no doubts that the decisive
meaning of the Incarnation was understood by apostles and
Christians of the first centuries, for they saw rightly the beginning of
the new epoch, foreshadowed by the prophets (confer please with
Acts 2:14-36 and notice the reference to Joel 3; 1; 5). St. Ireneus of
Lyon, the great teacher and a witness of the Tradition of the 2nd
century, called this epoch, which is coming together with the
Incarnation, novissima tempora – the latest times 10 , with other
words, the last times.
The simplicity of the terminology in The Symbol of Faith
and brevity of the dogmatic explanation is obvious. One must keep
in mind the comment on the previous element of The Symbol about
the conscious rejection of any speculative theologising.
About the reason of the Incarnation it is said briefly as
follows: ‘[…] Who for us men and for our salvation […]’.
Speculations about what would happen with the Incarnation and the
Salvation, if the primary sin had not occurred, are worthless and idle,
and there is no place for them in the rule of faith. On the other hand,
10
Ireneus of Lyon, Against Heresies, 3. 24, 1
22
the definition of this element of The Symbol of Faith is in

accordance with the clear words of the Scripture: ‘This is good and
pleasing in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires all men to be
saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth […]’ (1 Tim 2:3-4),
and suggests universality of the salvation, given to all humans. No
need to add, that The Symbol’s expression ‘for us men’ belongs not
only to this element, but to all the following elements that tell about
the economy of the incarnated Word.
Words ‘came down from Heaven’ have obviously no
meaning of any straight materiality: they point out the infinite
Divine descent in the Incarnation and stress all the reality of this
event, the mystical greatness of which is expressed in such a truth
and a beauty in the dogmatic letter by St. Sophrony (7th c.): ‘He,
Who has incarnated, had been incorporeal; He, Who accepted our
image, Who, due to His Divine Essence, had not had any outer or
visible presentation, He has gained a body like ours, He, Who is
immaterial, becomes truly Human, being always God; He was seen
in the womb of His Mother, and He is in the bosom of the Eternal
Father; He, Who is out of time, He receives a beginning in time – all
this is not by His wish, but by truly and really demeaning Himself
completely due to the Father’s will and due to His Will; He took on
Himself all our human nature, took the flesh that is of the same
nature as ours, took the reasonable soul – like our soul, the mind –
like our mind, for this is human’s nature.’11 It should be noted, that
the word ‘demeaning’ must be understood correctly, as it was
11
St. Sophrony, Dogmatic, a Letter, PO I.87, col. 3160 and 3161
23
borrowed from apostle Paul (Phil 2:7), because Christ in His

Incarnation put aside not His Divine Nature, but His Glory, which
He had before His earthly existence, and which He presented only
once in His Transfiguration. Word’s Incarnation did not bring any
changes into the unified Divine Nature. This truth of the faith is
reflected in the Church’s Lex Orandy12. So, in one of the liturgical
prayers of St. John Chrysostom we can read: ‘But besides Your
unspeakable and immeasurable humanity You had been without
doubt and without hesitation a man and our shepherd.’
The Church confesses that our Lord ‘was incarnate of the
Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’, and this corresponds to The
gospel’s minute description (Matt 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-38). Mention
of the Pristine Virgin Mary stresses all reality of a human in our
Saviour, Messiah from David’s kin, about Whom the Old Testament
had heralded. The Incarnation came to be not only according to the
eternal council of the Holy Trinity (1 Pet 1:17-20), but according to
the consent of the Holy Virgin (Luke 1:38) as well. In this trusting
obedience to the God’s word the Church’s Tradition sees the answer
to Eva’s disobedience. St. Justin wrote in the first half of the 2nd
century: ‘We understand that Christ became human through the
Virgin, so that the disobedience after snake’s instigation could end
the same way as it had began. Truly, Eva, who had been virgin and
blameless, by hearing snake’s words gave birth to disobedience and
12
This Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, was first coined by Prosper of Aquitane
in the 5th century in these words: “legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi,” meaning
“the law of prayer is the law of faith,” or “the Church believes as she prays.” (From
translator)
24
death; Virgin Mary, by learning faith and joy, when she heard in
archangel Gabriel’s message that the Spirit of God will descent on
her and power of the Highest will dawn on her, so that the Holy
Delivered by Her will be named the Son of God, answered: “Let it
happen to me according to your word”. So He was born of Her, He,
about Whom the Scripture tells so much. […] Through Him God
destroys the realm of the snake and those angels or men who have
chosen to be like him, and saves from death those, who repent in
their sins and believes in Him’13. This Father, who was so close to
the generation of the apostles, opens for us with great dogmatic
precision those fundaments, on which the Christian veneration of the
Holy Virgin Mary dwells.
Christ became through the Incarnation in His human
nature completely like us, but not with the sin. (Heb 2:17; Rom 8:3;
Phil 2:7).
13
St. Justin, PO, I.6, col.712
25
The Fourth Element

And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and
suffered, and was buried.
The task of redemption, which had been accomplished by

our Lord Jesus Christ, is indivisible and holistic. The Incarnation,
Death on the Cross, Resurrection – all those are only logical steps
on the way of redemption.
The element of The Symbol of Faith, which tells about
Passions, marks that this event took place ‘under Pontius Pilate’.
This stresses the historicity of Passions of the Lord. While the
assumed heroic events of pagan gods and heroes are placed in a
distant and fabulous past, the redemptive work of Christ was
accomplished in a precise historical environment.
Let us mark repetition of the expression ‘for us’, which is
already familiar to us from the element related to the Incarnation:
the expiatory death of Jesus Christ is the source of redemption and
reconciliation not only for humanity in its entirety, but for each
believer in particularity. There is a personal relation between Christ
and each Christian through the call ‘If anyone wants to come after
Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.’
(Matt 16:24; Marc 8:34; Luke 9:23).
Death on the Cross is inseparable from the Resurrection,
but one should be aware of any erroneous interpretation, which
would robe Passions of the Lord of their proper glory, and if the
26
Resurrection revealed His victory, then His death on the Cross

inexorably marked the defeat of evil’s power. Words of the crucified
Jesus – ‘Eloí, Eloí! lamá sabaktáni?’ – are words of the messianic
Psalm which expresses not only passion of the suffering of the
righteous, but his hope in God as well (Ps 22). And these words
must be comprehended in connection with the song of Jehovah’s
slave (Isa 52:13-53) and with the last words of the dying Jesus – ‘It
is finished’ (John 19:30). This glory, inherent to the Passions, is
stressed overall in the Tradition: in the Eastern Tradition the Cross
is always ‘life-giving’, and in the Western liturgy the Passions are
always called ‘glorious’ and ‘blessed’. This understanding is
correctly reflected in the Orthodox iconography, which consider any
painful contemplation of the Crucifixion as alien to the Orthodoxy.
Even at the moment of the most extreme ‘kenosis’14 the Church
remembers, that ‘He Who is hanging on the tree…is He Who hang
the Earth’15 Though one should not conclude that the Church does
not dwell in Her thoughts on the great and real sufferings of the
crucified Jesus. On the contrary, shocked by sorrow and love, she
cries: ‘How could Your holy flesh endure dishonour for our sake:
thorns to the head; spitting to the face; strikes to the jaw; bile in the
hyssop to the mouth; mockery and blasphemy to the ears; beating to
the shoulders, stick to the hand. Crucifixion of all body on the cross:
nails to the limbs, spear to the ribs. Suffered for us, and redeemed us
14
a process of emptying oneself (From translator)
15
The liturgy of the Holy Passions, antiphon [song] 15.
27
from the suffering, descended to us by your humanity and ascended

us to the almighty Saviour, have mercy on us’16.
Death on the cross brought the redemption and
reconciliation with God to the fallen human – this is the one of
fundamental dogmas of the Christian teaching. It would be
erroneous, or at the least excessively flawed, to interpret this dogma
in a way, that the redemption became an ethic or a legal category.
This tendency exactly, starting from the Middle Ages, made an
imprint on the Western theology, damaging the convincing reality of
the ancient Christian thought. The ethic-legal perspective stresses
the insult, inflicted to God by the original sin, which demands a
retribution in order to quench the Divine anger. The Orthodox
thought, based on the Holy Scripture, as well as on the liturgical and
antique patristic Tradition, understands redemption differently: the
original sin was a bitter fruit of freedom, given to human by his
Creator. God wished, that He was worshiped and loved by free
creatures, because only freedom gives meaning to love. Without a
possibility of self-determination, and it means the possibility of a
rejection, human’s love to God would be simply a reflection of
God’s love to Himself, like a light’s reflection in a mirror. Choosing
evil, human betrayed his vocation and fell into slavery of the
adversary. But God did not let human to drift limply with the stream
of his passions. Some Fathers – St. Ireneus of Lyon and St. Pheophil
of Antioch – explain the Divine condescension by immaturity of the
first humans. Though human sinned freely, he was not fully
16
2. strophe from ”Let us praise” from the morning liturgy in the Great Five
28
responsible for his sin. The process of reconciliation was

accomplished in Jesus Christ, the true God and the true Human. By
letting himself freely to death, He irreparably crushed its power, for
death was not able to conquer God-Human. The Latin hymn
Victimae Paxali [Let us extoll the Easter offer] sings about it in this
way: ‘An unusual struggle happened between death and life. Creator
of life lives, after been dead, and reigns.’ A human without sin, the
first born of the new humanity, free from the slavery of devil, Christ
presents himself to the Father as a pure offer, as an immaculate lamb.
The offering aspect of Jesus Christ’s death is intrinsically connected
with The Old Testament, which is herby accomplished and
surpassed. Offerings of the ancient Low were made in order to gain
the Divine propitiation, so that God would be inclined to cleanse our
sins. Those offerings were harbingers and prototypes of the perfect
offer of Christ; they are those, which, as St. John Chrysostom tells
in his liturgy, ‘handed over to us this necessary and bloodless holy
rite of offer’. Christ’s offer is not only the last, it is the only true
offer, and the Letter to Hebrews tells about it in this way: ‘Such a
high priest truly befits us – One who is holy, innocent, undefiled, set
apart from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other
high priests, He does not need to offer daily sacrifices, first for His
own sins and then for the sins of the people; He sacrificed for sin
once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as
high priest men who are week; but the oath, which came after the
law, appointed the Son, who has been perfect forever.’ (Heb 7:26-
28).
29
After His death the Lord was buried, and His Body
remained in His grave up to the third day. Troparion [a song of
praise] of the Eastern Easter liturgy tells about this moment with
great theological precision: ‘In the grave by flesh, in the hell though
by the soul as God, to the paradise together with the robber, and
Christ, the Indescribable, was on the Throne together with the Father
and the Holy Ghost, accomplishing everything’. During His earthly
service our Lord told many times about His burial: ‘A wicked and
adulterous generation demands a sign, but none will be given it
except the sign of the prophet Jonas’ (Matt 12:39; Luke 11:29; Mark
8:12), and also ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up again’ (John 2:19).
By descending to the hell as the Liberator, by crushing
death that came into the world through the sin, by His own death,
Christ became the New Adam, the First born of that new kin, which,
due to its relation to Christ-the Victor, is able now to gain again the
unity with God.
30
The Fifth Element

And the third day He arose again, according to the
Scriptures,
Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the heart of the

Christian teaching, that is why apostle Paul writes to Corinthians:
‘And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and
so is your faith’ (1 Cor 15:14). Apostles are witnesses of Christ
resurrected (look up in Acts 1:22). The Resurrection was truly a
dazzling manifestation of the messianic mission of Jesus and His
Divinity. A relation to this event is the verge, that separates faith
from disbelief, and this still remains valid without a doubt for all
generation until the end of time.
If Hebrews refused in their majority to accept Messiah in the
resurrected Jesus – was it a rejection of the reality of the
Resurrection, or was it just a lack of their conclusions about
consequences of the event – at least the idea itself, the possibility of
resurrection from the dead, was not alien to them, Sadducees
exclusive. It was not the case among the Pagans: the Christian
preaching of the universal resurrection and already happened
Resurrection of Christ has been perceiving by them with great
difficulty. In our days we easily forget that there is very little
common between the philosophical notion of the eternal soul and
the Biblical idea of the resurrection. That is why the preaching of
apostle Paul in the Areopagus has been met with a sarcastic
31
scepticism. (Acts 17:16-34). Precise therefor the majority of Hebrew

and Pagans remained indifferent to the portent of God.
For the faithful, who understood entire meaning of the event
through their faith, the Resurrection of the Lord is a dazzling
triumph of life over death, liberation from the curse, that had been
hanging over Adam’s offspring. That is why Easter is a celebration
of an unstoppable joy, and the Orthodox liturgy of that day tells
about it very eloquent: “The holy Easter shows itself for us today: a
new holy Easter; the mystical Easter; the true Easter; Easter Christ
the Redeemer; Easter the immaculate; Easter the great; Easter of the
faithful; Easter, which opens the doors of the Paradise for us; Easter,
which sanctifies all the faithful”17. For the ancient Israel Easter had
been a reminder of liberation from Egyptian yoke, for the Church –
new Israel – the Christian Easter is a reminder of liberation from the
yoke of death; it is as well a gospel of the universal resurrection,
which truly has began with the Resurrection of Christ.
The Church tells us about the great mystery of the
Resurrection not at the Easter liturgy alone, but at every weekly
liturgy as well. Theme of Easter penetrates all rite of baptism: the
neophyte proceeds spiritually from the slavery under devil to life in
Christ. ‘Or aren’t you aware,’- writes apostle Paul, - ‘that all of us
who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?
We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death, in
order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory
of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life’ (Rom 6:3-4). The
17
Song ’Let us extoll’
32
very moment of the Resurrection of the Lord escapes any human

comprehension (after all, the evangelists have not any description of
the event), that is why the Orthodox iconography, being faithful to
the Tradition, does not depict the moment of the Resurrection, but
only appearance of Christ Resurrected, who has been seen by many
witnesses. Apostle Paul even tells, that our Lord appeared for ‘[…]
more than five hundred brothers at once […]’ (1 Cor 15:6). By
adding that ‘most of whom are still alive’ (ibid), apostle lets
Corinthians, who might doubt in the reality of the Resurrected
Christ, know that they could interrogate those witnesses.
Nevertheless, Christophany [appearance of Christ Resurrected] was
not such grandiose event that made all people, or at least citizens of
Jerusalem, to believe in the Resurrection of the Lord. The Second
Coming of Jesus Christ will be such event, when He will come in
glory to judge living and dead. Till that time every human is given
freedom of choice, and for those, who whish to become a vessel of
Divine grace, comforting words of the resurrected Christ sound:
‘[…] blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’
(John 20:29). Therefore whole generations of Christians, even after
twenty centuries since the time of the apostolic witness, exclaim
boldly: ‘Seen the Resurrection of Christ let us bow to the Holy Lord
Jesus, the only one without sin. We adore Your cross, Christ, and
we sing and praise Your holy Resurrection’. And so, like the myrrh-
bearing wives, Christians wander spiritually up to the Grave to hear
words of an angel, who brings the gospel. The Christian can not be
satisfied with an intellectual accept of the reality of the Resurrection.
33
Everyone, who has been baptized, must be able to say together with
the Apostle: ‘I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live,
but Christ lives in me […]’ (Gal 2:20). The Christian’s position is a
paradoxical one. He lives in this world, but through his connection
with Christ he breaks from the world, because ‘this world’ dos not
have a wish to submit to Christ’s supremacy.
The Symbol of Faith proclaims, that the Lord has been risen
‘on the third day […] according to the Scriptures’. Meaning of this
last expression is much more affluent then it seems to the eye. This
is the double reference to The Old Testament (the expression
‘Scriptures’ refers to The Old Testament here). There is the direct
appeal to the prophetic testimony from the Book of Jonas. Our Lord
tells about ‘sign of Jonas’ as a prototype of His burial and
resurrection (Matt 12:39-40 and 16:4; Luke 11:29-32). The
resurrected Christ interprets the Scripture to Emmaus travellers
otherwise in His reference to The Old Testament: ‘[…] ”O foolish
ones, how slow are your hearts to believe all that the prophets have
spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things
and then to enter His glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the
Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the
Scriptures about Himself.’ (Luke 24:25-27). The Lord tells to
apostles: ‘[…] ”These are the words I spoke to you while I was still
with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in
the Low of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.” Then He opened
their minds to understand the Scriptures. And He told them: “This
what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the
34
third day […]”’ (Luke 24:44-46). Let us notice that when the
Hebrew said ‘Low’, ‘the Prophets’, and ‘the Psalms’, they had in
mind the totality of the Scriptures according to the triple
construction of the Hebrew Bible.
In the original Christian practice of catechesis the references
to evidences from The Old Testament about Resurrection of Jesus
Christ have had extreme importance. We can easily make sure of it,
if we read apostle Peter’s appeal to the crowd at the Pentecost (Acts
2:14-36, especially 25-35).
35
The Sixth Element

and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of
the Father;
By proclaiming redeeming work of our Lord after the

element about His third day’s Resurrection, The Symbol of Faith
conveys, that He ascended and sat ‘at the right hand of the Father’.
This concludes those elements, that relate to Christ’s earthly
ministry. The period of the Incarnation, or, more precise, being of
the incarnated Christ on earth, is concluded by His Ascension.
Nevertheless, Christ’s earthly ministry is intimately connected to the
following epoch, that of the Church, which will be concluded by the
Second and glorious Coming of the Lord. Connection between these
two periods is distinguished in the Holy Scripture by two ways. First
of all, outwardly, by the very literate composition of the Scripture:
Evangelist Luke concludes his Gospel by the narration of the
Ascension and begins his Book of Acts with the detailed exposition
of the same event. By the inner aspect though, The New Testament
conveys to us Redeemer’s words, which stresses that His ascension
by no means indicates a departure. The calm confidence of the
Church in constant care by the Redeemer is based on the last words
of Christ, already mentioned her (Matt 28:20). We hear a response
to these words in the kondak 18 of the Eastern liturgy of the
Ascension: ‘And so to watch over us, and to unite the heavenly at
18
kontakion/κοντάκιον/the song
36
earth, You has ascended, Christ our God, not to depart from us, but
to remain united and to call upon all those who love You: “I am with
you, and you are likewise.”’
The Ascension is a crown of Christ’s offering: the slain
lamb appears in front of the Father to present in His God-Human
person the regenerated unity between God and human. On this
occasion we read in the Letter to Hebrews: ‘But when this Priest had
offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right
hand of God.’ (Heb 10:12). The redeeming death on the Cross, the
Resurrection, and the Ascension are interconnected in a such
intimate way that God tells about them as about an indivisible
whole: ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
to Myself’ (John 12:32).
The descent from heavens, mentioned in the Third Element
of The Symbol, can be correlated with the Ascension only in one
particular way – in a way of kenosis of the Son of God, which
begins with the Incarnation and concludes with the Ascension. And,
beside, one should remember that His emptying did not change in
any way inner-Trinitarian relations, because Three-hypostatic God is
eternal and unchangeable, and the Son is ontologically connected
with the Father and the Holy Ghost independent of any concrete
historical circumstances. On the other hand, though, the special
character of the Ascension must be stressed, and particularly the
apotheosis, or glorification of the God-human. Christ is the New
Adam, the Head of the renewed humanity, which precisely by His
person from now on and forever is in Glory ‘at the right hand of the
37
Father’. We can see from this, that Redemption was not a simple
withdrawal of the curse, brought upon humans by the sin, - for the
glory, which humans gained in Jesus Christ, remains irreversible.
That is why apostle Paul writes: ‘[…] the glorious Father, may give
you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in your knowledge of Him. I
ask that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you may
know the hope of His calling, the reaches of His glorious inheritance
in the saints, and the surpassing greatness of His power to us who
believe. These are in accordance with the working of His mighty
strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the
dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far
above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name
that is named, not only in the present age, but also in the one to
come.’ (Eph 1:17-21).
So, the Ascension is in no way a kind of ‘de-incarnation’ of
the Divine Word, because there is no reverse motion in the history
of redemption, as it is folding out according to the eternal
providence of God. The teaching of The New Testament about the
Church, which is the Body of Christ, becomes only comprehensible
through the believe in that Christ had been ascended and is sitting by
the right hand of the Father. Christ outpours His Divine life on the
Church, if we may say, in an organic way, according to the
harmony between the Head and the parts. God the Father ‘[…] put
everything under His feet and made Him head over everything for
the church, which is His body […]’ (Eph 1:22-23; Col 1:18). The
sober theology does not reject the power of this proclamation, -
38
otherwise other proclamations of the Holy Scripture would miss

power as well, like the proclamation, that foreshadows to the
members of the Church a possibility of becoming ‘communicants
with the Divine essence’. Hereby, only in connection with the
teaching about the Church as Christ’s Body we are able to
comprehend this mystical word of the Redeemer, which is conveyed
to us through the forth Gospel: ‘Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever
hears my Word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and
will not come under judgement. Indeed, he has crossed over from
death to life.’ (John 5:24).
Precisely because the Ascension is not a departure, the
Pentecost is the necessary continuation, and God tells clearly about
it: ‘But I tell you the truth, it is for your benefit I am going away.
Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I
will send Him to you.’ (John 16:7). Though by the name Pentecost
we call a certain event (descend of the Holy Ghost at the fiftieth day
after the Easter), actually, entire time of the Church’s existence,
which has began from that event, can be considered as a constant
Pentecost, because the Church’s life is nothing other but a
manifestation of the Holy Ghost. Particularly, the participant of
every Eucharist pleads God to send down His Holy Spirit at His
people and at the Holy Gifts.
Through Christ, who has reconciled humans with God by
becoming the voluntary offer, humanity is reunited in Him with God
by the way of Ascension and finds itself in Glory at the God’s right
hand, and every human’s challenge is to gain for oneself the
39
redemption offered by Jesus Christ. God offers the redemption, but

not imposes it on human for not to abuse his freedom. After the
Incarnation, like before it, human is born in sin, to the servitude
under the evil. But since the redeeming Work of Christ has taken
place, human got an opportunity, by becoming a part of Christ’s
Body, to participate in the new creation. In order to do this human
must be susceptible toward the grace coming on the way, because he
is not able to achieve anything by his own power. It is what the
Church firmly teaches, and it warns against any other conception of
redemption according Pelagius 19 . However, such a necessary
intervention from God does not suggest by any means human’s
passivity, and everyone should remember words of the Teacher to
His disciples in all times: ‘[…] ”If anyone wants come after Me, he
must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” […]’ (Matt
16:24; Marc 8:34; Luke 9:23). To throw an old human off and put
the new one on is necessary for practicing a constant austerity. If the
baptism is a denunciation of devil’s dominance and union with the
Christ’s Body, then in order to keep the gained and to be fruitful,
one has to battle without interruption. This spiritual ascension - no
matter how hard it could be - is only done due to the power of the
undeniable optimism of the Christian teaching, because the believer
hears the Redeemer’s words, which support courage and strengthen
19
Pelagius (354-420/440) was a British monk. He refused the teaching about the
primary sin of Adam. Pelagianism is a belief in, that human is able to gain God’s
redemption by his actions and his free will alone without God’s help, through love
and mercy. (From translator)
40
hope in him ‘[…] In the world you will have tribulation. But take
courage; I have overcome the world!’ (John 16:33).
41
The Seventh Element

and He shall come again with glory to judge the living
and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no end.
Believe in Christ’s Second Coming is one of the undeniable

basics of the Christian teaching as a whole, and any attempt to ‘de-
eschatologize 20’ Christianity by striking over or minimizing this
dogma of the faith is a distortion of the Christian gospel. To
comprehend the place of this dogma in the Church, one should look
at it from the proper perspective. Truly, the Christian understanding
of time and history presents us for a horizontal line: there is the
beginning – creation of the world; the tragic handling of human, his
fall; the central event – the Incarnation; and the end – the Second
Coming. Hence, as Christ’s offer had been the single event of its
kind (Heb 7:27), so the last Judgement will also be a single and
concluding act. This is the firm believe of the Church, and that is
why the 5th Universal Council of 553 condemned a whole array of
conceptions in Origen’s21 style, which were founded on the cyclic
understanding of time, and which is not comparable with the
Revelation. Eschatological hope is one of the basics in the Orthodox
sacramental theology. That is why a congregation of the Christians
at the Eucharist evening is not merely a commemoration of the
20
Eschatology (from Greek eschatos/έσχατος/last) is a teaching about last times
(From translator)
21
Origen (185-254 f.Kr.) was one of Church fathers from Alexandria. Some of his
concepts had been judged as heresies, such as his teaching about everything’s
restoration, where Satan will be also redeemed at last. (From translator)
42
event, which had happened in the past and is ‘actualized’ in the

sacrament, but it is also touched by eschatological hope of the
Messiah’s congregation, of the Church. This is strongly stressed in
Paul’s homily, which follows after his narration about establishment
of the sacrament of Communion: ‘For as often as you eat this bread
and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes’ (1
Cor 11:26). In the words of our Lord, conveyed to us by evangelist
Matthew ‘I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from
now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in My Father’s
kingdom’ (Matt 26:29), there is a clear eschatological indication.
The Eucharistic congregation is a prototype of the Church, that will
be summoned in the coming future. We read in the most ancient
Christian document, the Didache (1st-2nd century), the following
words, which extoll this hope: ‘Like this broken bread, which first
had been sown on the hills, but after has been gathered in granaries
and became one, so Your Church will be gathered in Your Kingdom
from all corners of the earth […]’ and further: ‘Remember, Lord,
Your Church in deliverance from any evil, and in a perfection of
Your love. Gather it from the four winds, Your holy Church in Your
Kingdom prepared for Her by You’.
The first Christians lived in an impatient expectation of
Christ’s return, and they expressed this impatience in a concise
Aramaic formula, which is mentioned by apostle Paul – ‘µαρὰν
ἀθά/Come, Lord.’ (1 Cor 16:22). However, Lord warned His
disciples against seeking the exact date of the Second coming (Matt
24:36; Acts 1:7). The same apostle Paul wrote, while calling
43
Thessalonians to be vigil: ‘For you fully aware that the Day of the
Lord will come like a thief in the night.’ (1 Thess 5:2). Christians
must live all the time in an expectation of the Parousia22, but this
expectation must not turn into an idle curiosity and a temptation of
the Divine Providence. The Church tries not to make any hasty
conclusions on the basis of some places from the Book of Daniel or
the Book of Apocalypse, while some dissidents of all times misuse
this in order to determine with a mathematical precision the very
moment of the Parousia, or to brand one of their brothers as lost.
Such speculations are not only contradict to Lord’s admonitions, but
they as well witness about absolute ignorance of those, who fall for
a temptation to make such researches. These people have no idea
about rules of Hebrew apocalyptic, which are well known now,
thanks to many documents from the period between 2nd century BC
and 2nd century AC.
We already insisted on the differences between two
comings of the Lord in the world: the First was emptying Himself
(kenosis) in self-sacrifice. The Second will be a demonstration of the
God’s power for all creation. This is stressed in The Symbol by the
expression ‘with glory’. With the end of this world the possibility of
any change will seize, everything will become completely
irreversible as out of time. That is why our Lord proclaims: ‘And
they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into
eternal life’ (Matt 25:46). St. John the Theologian means the same
absolute timelessness in his Apocalypse, when he tells about the
22
from Greek παρουσία/appearance, here: second coming of Christ. (From translator)
44
second death (Rev 20:13-15). The last Judgement will be the final
victory of Christ over all powers of evil, which, despite the Cross
and the Resurrection, will not accept their inexorable defeat.
Please pay attention, that the Holy Scripture, as well as The
Symbol of Faith, stresses, that the Last Judgement is a universal
event. Christ comes as the King of the Universe. We read about it:
‘When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with
Him, He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be
gathered before Him…’ (Matt 25:31-32; Rev 20:11-15).
Let us remark, that the Orthodox iconography interpreted
this theme of the Last Judgement in various ways, first in a
symbolical narrative about a shepherd separating lambs from goats
(Picture 1), and later by depicting Christ realistically, where He
appears ‘in clouds’ sitting on the Throne among apostles in order to
judge living and dead, who are awoken by Archangel’s trumpet
(Picture 2).
The Seventh Element of The Symbol of Faith is concluded
with the proposition: ‘Whose Kingdom shall have no end’. These
words from The Symbol, accepted during the Second Universal
Council of 381, were not present in the Creed of the Nicean Fathers.
They were added to The Symbol in order to refute heretical
conclusions of Marcellus23, who postulated, that Christ’s Kingdom
will end together with the end of time. This position does not
23
Marcellus was a bishop in Ancyra in Galatia in beginning of the 4th century. He
participated in the Nicea Council of 325 and was a strong adversary to Arianism. In
his Trinitarian modal theology, though, he clamed, that both Christ and the Holy
Ghost were modi of God. (From translator)
45
contradict to his modal theology, where Trinity is presented as a

simple temporary triple modus of the Divine Being, which will in
the end be gathered into a single monad (God).
Already at the Antioch Council of 341 we meet the
formula: ‘Which will come again to judge living and dead and will
remain as the King and God forever’.
In a joyful expectation of the glorious return of the Lord
the Christian exclaims: ‘Let the grace come, let this world come!
Amen!’24 But being aware of all weaknesses of his nature, the same
Christian prays: ‘When You, God, will come to earth in glory and
everybody trembles: fireflood is running in front of the judgement
seat, books open their pages, the hidden reveals itself: then redeem
me from the never quenching fire and make me worth to stand by
Your right hand, the righteous Judge’25.
24
Didache
25
a kondak [a short song] in the liturgy during a meat free week. (From translator)
46
Picture 1: Sheep are separated from goats. A mosaic in the St. Apolinarius temple
in Ravenna. ca. 520
47
Picture 2: The Judgement Day. A mosaic in cathedral in Torchello. 9th century
48
The Eighth Element

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who
proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the
Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spoke by
the prophets.
After declaration of her faith in the Person and mission of our

Redeemer Jesus Christ, the Church expresses Her faith in the Third
Person of the Holy Trinity. Fathers of the First Universal Council
just mentioned about Church’s believe in existence of the Holy
Ghost. It can be explained by the fact, that they were mostly
concentrated on the teaching about Divinity of the Word, at the
point, where the Catholic Orthodoxy clashed with Arianism 26 .
Nevertheless, discussions, which continued up to the end of the 4th
century, could not left pneumatology27 untouched as well, because
there were not just Arianists, who rejected Divinity of the Holy
Ghost, but there were also Christians, who, though rejected
conception of Arius concerning the Word, but would not accept
Divinity of the Spirit and His same nature with God. So, Fathers of
that epoch had to defend the Orthodox teaching about the Third
Person of the Holy Trinity and consequently the inner-Trinitarian
relations. The Second Universal Council of 381 in Constantinople
once more condemned Arius’ heresy in all its versions, and
26
Se explanation in the Introduction (From translator)
27
Teaching about Holy Spirit (From translator)
49
especially condemned Macedonius’ heresy, who rejected Divinity of

the Holy Ghost. Church Fathers proclaimed at that time clear and
firmly absolute fullness of the Holy Ghost’s Divinity, though, in
order to keep calm some conservative Christians, who would oppose
any new definition, even if it would express the Church faith
completely, Fathers did not include notions such ‘God’ and ‘being
of same nature’ in relation to the Holy Ghost in The Symbol of Faith.
This caution brought its fruits, and heresy of Pneutomachers28 was
finally eradicated, and the Trinitarian terminology, expressing
Church’s faith, was finally completed.
The Christian faith in the Holy Ghost as a distinct Person of
the Holy Trinity is based on revelation of The New Testament, and
first of all on the words of our Redeemer: ‘Therefore go and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ (Matt 28:19).
The Old Testament without any doubts knew God’s Spirit as
an active Force, and in the prophetic visions the end of times is
defined by outpouring of this Spirit (Isa 44:3; Joel 2:28). But only in
The New Testament the Word and the Spirit are able to be
comprehended as Persons.
The Christian teaching does not in any way refuse the strict
monotheism of the revelation at Sinai, and it postulates the principle
28
Pneumatomachers (from Greek Pneumatomákhoi/ Πνευµατοµάχοι) were also
known as Macedonists (followers of Macedonius) or half-Arianists. They were active
in Constantinople and Tropiky in Alexandria, where a sect of anti-Nikean Creed was
popular in the end of 4th- beginning of 5th century. They rejected the Holy Ghost’s
divinity, that is why they were called pneumatomachers/fighters against Spirit. (From
translator)
50
of numerical unity of the Divine Essence, but Christianity confess

not a sole monotheism, but a ternary one. St. Gregory the
Theologian tells excellently about this Divine mystery: The Old
Testament clearly confessed the Father, but not with the same clarity
the Son; The New Testament revealed the Son and gave an
indication about Divinity of the Spirit; now the Spirit is with us and
He gives us the clearest knowledge about Himself. It was not safe to
confess the Son clearly before Divinity of the Father had been
confessed, and, to say boldly, to burden us with a sermon about the
Holy Spirit before the Son has been confessed […]. It ought to be
this way, that the Trinitarian Council illuminated those enlightened
by gradual additions, or as David sais, ascensions (Ps 38:6), by
transitions from glory to glory and successes […]. After the
Redeemer had preached to His disciples many things, He still had
some things, which, as He told Himself, His disciples were not able
to accommodate at that time (John 16:12). And the Redeemer told
also, that we will be taught everything by the descended Spirit (John
16:13). And I attribute the very Divinity of the Spirit to this’29.
The Father is the source of Divinity in the Holy Trinity – He
gives the Son His Essence by birth, and He gives His Divinity to the
Holy Spirit by procession. Therefore The Symbol of Faith postulates,
according to the teaching of the Redeemer Himself (John 15:26),
that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The different from
Spirit’s modus of Son’s existence assumes different Hypostasis; the
Church insists on this definition, but at the same time Holy Fathers
29
Gregory the Theologian, The Word, 31.
51
admit, that the human mind is not capable to comprehend, what this
difference is. St. Gregory the Theologian writes: ‘So what is the
procession? Explain Father’s not-birth:- then I will dare to speculate
about Son’s birth and Spirit’s procession; and then, by penetrating
into Divine mysteries, both of us will be amused’30.
St. John Damascene briefly tells, that none of the mind’s
efforts is able to convey us, ‘how’ the Son had been born, and how
the Holy Spirit proceeds 31 . However, the Western scholastic
theology made attempts to explain the birth and the procession by
way of psychological analogies. Though the blessed Augustine,
bishop of Hippo, used this method too, but he was able to see in it
only the way of comparison, which could help human mind to
approach the Trinitarian mystery, and he did not consider this
method to be a rational explanation of Divine inner-Trinitarian
relations. He writes this: ‘As for the difference between the birth and
the procession – I do not know, and not able, and not in a condition
to comprehend’32.
The Orthodox Church considers the formula ‘proceeds from
the Father’ as complete and sufficient expression of Her faith. In
counterpoise to heretics, who clamed that the Spirit was created, the
defenders of the Orthodoxy stressed, that the Spirit proceeds directly
from the Father; exactly this proclaims St. Gregory the Theologian:
30
Gregory the Theologian, The Word, 31.
31
St. John Damascene, About the Orthodox Faith, 1, 8.
32
St. Augustine, Confessions, 11, 4.
52
‘The Holy Spirit, as He proceeds from the Father, can not be a

creature’33.
From the beginning of the 5th century the Western Trinitarian
theology took another direction: in order to defend Divinity of the
Son from Arianists, and to stress connection between the Holy
Spirit and the Son, they began to claim, first occasionally, then
systematically, that the Holy Spirit processes from both the Father
and the Son (filioque/and the son). With the further development of
this concept - first in Spain, than in Gallia and Germany - they
boldly changed The Universal Symbol of Faith by adding notion
‘filioque’ to it. Rome did not approve this addition. But in the
beginning of the 11th century, when papacy became completely
dependent on German emperors, this novelty to the Creed was
accepted by Rome as well. This event ought to be condemned of
two grounds: firstly, because this addition expressed a teaching, that
was not based on the Revelation, and secondly, because text of the
Creed was changed by one side only, by the Western Church alone,
which, herby, violated the catholic origin of collegiality. If the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, it does not mean, that He is
alien to the Son; St. John Damascene writes on this: ‘[…] we also
say, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and call it
‘Father’s Spirit’, we do not say, that He proceeds from the Son, but
that He is ‘Son’s Spirit’34. In the beautiful Creed by St. Gregory
Neocaesarean from the 3rd century, to which we already referred in
33
St. Gregory the Theologian, The Word, 31.
34
St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith, 1, 8.
53
relation to his teaching about the Word, we can read: ‘And one Holy
Ghost, which has His being from the Father and which appeared
through the Son, that is, through a human; a perfect image of the
perfect Son, the life, the reason of all living, the holy source,
sanctity, the consecrator, through whom God the Father manifests
Himself, being both over all and in all, and God the Son, being
through all.’ So, if in the ontological and eternal order the Spirit
proceeds from the Father, in the messianic aspect He is presented
through the Son. ‘We confess,’- writes St. John Damascene,- ‘that
He (the Holy Spirit) is given to us and manifested Himself through
the Son’35.
The Holy Spirit is the source of all consecration. The
Redeemer tells before His Passions about the coming of the Spirit,
and this promise is fulfilled at the day of Pentecost. The Church’s
life is nothing else but this event, made eternal in the sacraments.
The Holy Spirit’s presence differs the Church drastically from any
other gathering, and conveys to Her a clear assurance in difficult
times.
The Holy Spirit is the active force, that consecrates every
Christian. By receiving the Holy Spirit’s grace, we are able to call
upon God – ‘Abba, Father!’ (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). That is why
apostle Paul calls the Holy Spirit ‘Spirit of an adoption’: ‘The Spirit
Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.’ (Rom
8:16).
35
St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith, 1, 8.
54
We confess in The Symbol of Faith the life-giving Spirit

because the grace, conveyed to us through Him, makes us real
‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4). This should not be
understood in a pantheistic 36 meaning, but neither one should
deprive the Scripture of its true meaning, and perceive this
expression as a metaphor. The Orthodox Church, by defending the
teaching about the Divine transcendence, and by proclaiming at the
same time a possibility of divinization of the created human,
rigorously teaches us to distinguish between the incomprehensible
Essence of God and the Divine energies [grace], available to human.
The grace, which already surrounds us in this world, shines upon
those, who distance themselves from the vanity through the austerity.
The same grace will with the second Coming transform whole
universe, it will reveal Christ’s victory and unite creation with the
Creator in light and love.
36
Pantheism (Greek pan/πάν/everything and theos/θεός/god, means ’god is
everything’, an expression for a conception, that God is in everything, is the same as
the world. (From translator)
55
The Ninth Element

In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
By presenting the Church as an object of faith, The Symbol

reminds us, that She is not only a gathering of the believers, but that
She plays a major role in the history of redemption.
During His earthly mission our Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed,
that He Himself will be Her Creator (Matt 16:18), and many places
in The New Testament state, that Christ is Her Head (as in Eph
1:22). Hebrew kahal/‫ קהל‬means ‘gathering of Israel after the call
from God’. So, we read in the Deuteronomy: ‘[…] so that you do
not forget the things your eyes have seen […]. The day you stood
before the LORD your God at Horeb, the LORD said to me, “Gather
the people before Me to hear My words […] He declared to you His
covenant, which He commanded you to follow - the Ten
Commandments that He wrote on two tablets of stone.’ (Deu 4:9-
10,13). We meet as well the expression ‘kahal/‫קהל‬/ekklesia’ as a
designation of solemn people gatherings in Jerusalem. Hence, this
expression was never used out of a religious context, which
correlates to its use in both The New Testament and antic Christian
literature, where it means both the local community and the
gathering of the believers. The expression ‘Church of God’ (1 Cor
1:2) is frequently used as well.
The Church is defined in The Symbol of Faith as Unified,
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. These inherent definitions of the
56
Church constitute the one and indivisible whole, because every one
of them is correlated to others. They are different in their meaning,
but none of them can be omitted. In other words, it is damaging to
interpret or omit any of them, for it would distort meaning of the
others. So, for example, the Orthodox understanding of unification
is connected with the specific understanding of collegiality. It is not
for nothing St. Cyprian of Cartago titled his text, which was aimed
against Schismatics, ‘About unity of the Catholic Church’. When
one begins to study the teaching about Church, one should avoid
inaccuracies and ambiguous conceptions. One should avoid at least
two extremes: on one hand, all too ‘spiritual’ understanding of the
Church, which eliminates Her social and organizing reality; on the
other hand, stressed institutionalism, under which the spiritual part
of the Church moves to a shade. In practice, these two aspects can
be united, as it happened in the protestant ecclesiology37, which
allows some ambiguity: on one hand, the spiritual Church of the
chosen ones, on the other, – self organizing congregations.
The Church is united. Our Lord Jesus Christ had founded
only one Church, to which He promised His help, and which rightly
is the keeper of the evangelical gospel. In antiquity this statement
was a truth, which had no need to be proven, and which is still true
in our days for the Christians faithful to the Tradition. There can not
be several Churches, as it can not be several truths. Though,
according to the tradition, that has its foundation back in the
apostolic time, one tells sometimes about ‘churches’ in the meaning
37
a teaching about Church (From translator)
57
‘local congregations’, but this not at all presumes plurality, as well

as the Eucharist, being hold in many places, does not suggest any
partition of Christ. Another matter, when the definition ‘church’ is
used to signify congregations of Christians-dissidents; in this case
the definition does not bear any specific theological meaning, and
one means by this simple a Christian congregation.
When we say, that the Church is unified, we express the
whole fullness of this statement. We invest a double meaning in the
definition of Church’s unification. There is a unity in time: the
Church of today, in Her essence, is the same as that Apostolic
Church and the Church of the Holy Fathers of the first centuries.
There is a unity in space: the local churches, who confess in purity
the Orthodox faith, and who faithfully keep the apostolic continuity,
remain in relation to each other, they have One Founder and the
Head – Christ.
The Church is Holy. The Church is Holy because, being
founded by Christ, She serves only God. She is like a bride, ‘[…]
without stain or wrinkle or any such blemish, but holy and
blameless.’ (Eph 5:27). In works of Clement of Alexandria we read
lines that are full of a profound depth: ‘If we call holy God Himself,
or a building erected in His glory, how can we avoid not to call
predominantly holy the Church, which became holy in Her
knowledge of Divine Glory? Does not She a sanctuary, absolutely
worthy of God, which had been prepared, not by labourers or doers,
neither by painters’ hands, but erected to be a sanctuary by will of
58
God?’38. Holy by Her vocation, the Church is bearer of grace, which

Spirit pours constantly out since the day of Pentecost. This grace is
conveyed to every Her member, first through the baptism, then
through other sacraments. Life in the Church is life in Christ and
nothing else, that is why this life is always an austerity, which
excludes any passivity.
The Church is Catholic. If in the vernacular Greek the
expression κάθολικος/catholicos means just ‘common’, then in the
Church’s language it gains a special hue: collegiality (Catholicism)
is a property, which the Church had had already, when it was a
small gathering of Palestinian disciples, and in the equal measure
She possesses it in our days, when She is spread over five continents.
Gospel of redemption, uttered by Jesus Christ, is the Gospel for all
humanity (Matt 28:19-20); in Christ any racial and cultural
differences are abolished, as apostle Paul writes: ‘For there is no
difference between Jew and Greek: The same Lord is Lord of all,
and gives richly to all who call on Him.’ (Rom 10:12). This
catholicity of the Church is a kind of fullness, where every person,
according to the Christian Orthodox teaching, can ‘flourish’,
because adversity between part and the whole is overcome in the
Church, who’s life is a reflection of life of the Triune God.
Catholicity is also a renouncement of the sectarian particularism,
and precisely this aspect is stressed first of all in the texts of the
Holy Fathers, where we find the definition ‘catholic’ (collegial). So,
in the inscription in the Letter ‘Martyrdom of St. Polycarp’ (2nd
38
Stromata VII, V-23.
59
century) we read the formula: ‘God’s Church, which is in Smyrna,

to God’s Church, which is in Philomena, and to all congregations
who belong to the Holy Catholic Church […]” Martyr Polonius
replied to his judge in the middle of the 2nd century, that he is
Christian, but as his reply was considered insufficient, he was asked
to what Church does he belong, on which he replied: ‘to the
Catholic Church’. Term ‘Catholic’ here means the true Church,
founded by Christ. This exact meaning we find always in the
documents of Councils, and in particular, in the dogmatic ruling of
the Fathers of the First Universal Council of 325.
The Church is Apostolic. She is Apostolic, because She was
founded by apostles, and because She faithfully keeps Redeemer’s
Gospel passed by apostles. In this meaning ‘apostolicity’ is a
synonym to ‘authenticity’, that is why ‘apostolicity’ in full its
meaning only can be related to Unam Sanctum (the Only Holy), that
is, to the Orthodox Church. Continuity of the apostolic succession is
a necessary condition, but by no means sufficient. Bishops, who
keep faithfully the apostolic teaching, are the legal successors of the
apostles; the right to proclaim the word of truth and interpret the
Tradition belongs to them; to them – to every one in particular and
to them all together – belongs the power of teaching (Potestas
docendi). Bishops (successors of apostles) and their representatives
(priests) bring the bloodless offer in the name of the Church,
because the words of the Redeemer relate precisely to them: ‘Do
this in memory of Me’. They have the power to bind and decide, and
they are responsible for stewarding the spiritual flock entrusted to
60
them by God. The Orthodox Church was never in doubt that

episcopacy belongs not to bene esse (prosperity) or plene esse
(multiplicity) of the Church, but to Her very nature. That is why St.
Ignatius even writes, that one should ‘look at the bishop as at the
Redeemer Himself’39. This, however, does not mean that a bishop
has an autocratic power; on the contrary, he must be connected with
the Tradition of the Church and he must be in the obvious relation to
all Orthodox episcopacy, which possesses the fullness of power
according to the universal structure of the Church, inherited from
the apostolic congregation. On the other hand, if by power of the
teaching charisma, that follows from the apostolic succession, the
legal bishops have the exclusive right officially interpret the
confession, which the Church teaches (and therefore an exclusive
right to expel heretics from the Church), all Christians are obliged to
defend the Faith from any possible distortions. It is in the unity of
shepherds and all Christian people, who are faithful to the Gospel of
the Redeemer and to the apostolic faith, the collegial unity of the
Holy Church manifests Herself.
39
Letter of St. Ignatius to Ephesians, 5.1.
61
The Tenth Element

I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
This element of The Symbol reminds us that confession of

faith begins with the baptism. By proclaiming that redemption of
sins is only possible in the baptism we admit that the unification
with Christ in the Church is the only way to be saved. In old times
the mystery of the baptism usually was executed over adults, who
were urged to be consecrated in the Christian teaching before
baptism. By expressing a wish to be baptized the neophytes were
conscious about that it would mean the break with the previous life.
Today, by exception of those countries, where Church is in a
missionary status, the baptism is conducted differently: children of
an infant age are allowed to participate in the mystery, so that they
could be part of the Christian life, according to the Redeemer’s
words: ‘[…] Let the little children come to Me […]’ (Luke 18:16).
In both occasions reading of this element of The Symbol of Faith is
a renewal of the vows, given under baptism directly or through the
Godfather and/or Godmother. During the liturgy The Symbol of
Faith is sung or recited before anaphora40; in that moment it timely
reminds to the congregation of believers about the sacraments of
baptism and sounds like an echo of the warning words of apostle
40
Greek αναφορά/anaphora/repetition of the thanksgiving pray before communion
(From translator)
62
Paul: ‘Each one must examine himself before he eats of the bread
and drinks of the cup’ (1 Cor 11:28).
The element of The Symbol of Faith, which belongs to the
baptism, follows right after the element, which tells about the
Church, and this order is logical, for there is no other way to be
admitted to the church congregation, founded by Christ, but through
the admission of the baptism. So, this mystery is the beginning of
the whole Christian life: a human is spiritually born anew in it, and,
as we mentioned already, from the very beginning it suggests a
break with all that does not belong to the Kingdom of God. There is
no compromise: ‘No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate
the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and
despise the other […]’ (Matt 6:24; Luke 16:13). Apostle Paul writes
to Romans: ‘Or aren’t you aware that all of us who were baptized
into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We therefore were
buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that, just as
Christ was raised from the dead trough the glory of the Father, we
too may walk in newness of life. […] Now if we died with Christ,
we believe that we will also live with Him. For we know that since
Christ was raised from the dead, He can not die again; death no
longer has dominion over Him. The death He died He died to sin
once for all; but the life He lives He lives to God. So you too must
count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.’ (Rom
6:3-4, 8-11).
Two moments stand out in the baptism sacrament: the
moment of break – ‘Do you reject Satan and all his doings and all
63
servitude to him, and all his pride?’ and the moment of connection –
‘Do you devote yourself to Christ?’. In the Christian antiquity every
part of the baptism was full of symbols. But some of this symbolic
goes far beyond the meaning of a simple allegory. The Church keeps
them carefully, though today they are not clear for many. Fathers in
their baptizing instructions insisted on taking off the dilapidated
human, as well as taking on a white robe as a symbol of purity,
gained through the receiving of the sacrament.
It is known that in the Orthodox Church baptism is carried
out through a immersion with the exception of some cases. The
entire meaning of the sacrament is delivered in this. We read in
‘Apostolic Regulations’ the following pray, devoted to a
consecration of the water in the baptistery: ‘Consecrate this water so
the neophytes become crucified together with Christ, die with Him,
get buried with Him, and resurrect with Him in adoption’.
To convey the meaning of the triple immersion – ‘an image
of three days of Easter’ – Cyril of Jerusalem (4th century) writes the
following marvellous lines: ‘How amazing and strange! We did not
die in reality, and were not buried in reality, and in reality we are not
resurrected after been crucified. If the imitation happened after the
image, the redemption though is real. Christ had been crucified in
reality, and in reality He was placed in the tomb, and He was
resurrected in reality. And all this was done in the name of love to
us, so that we, participating in His passions by imitation, would be
able to gain the real redemption’. It is understandable now that the
Orthodox Church remains faithful to the ancient way of instructing
64
about the sacrament of baptism not alone of devotion to the past.

She does this through the power of the sacred significance of the rite.
There is no doubt that the refusal of baptism through the immersion
caused with it disappearance of the symbolism, inherent to this
sacrament. In the Orthodox Church the sacrament of anointing
always follows after the sacrament of the baptism – the action,
which is in the West called confirmation. Really, if the baptism
marks a birth to the spiritual life, then anointing confirms the
charismatic inclusion into the Christian congregation through the
grace of the Holly Ghost. Usually the Christian consecration is
concluded by participation in the sacrament of Communion. For the
neophyte this is a complete unification with the Lord, and a promise
to the new Christian, that she will be a participant in the coming
feast of the Kingdom. With this - through the baptism and anointing
- the process of transformation ‘vaccinated’. Hereby, the Christian
consecration combines three sacraments – the baptism, the anointing,
the communion - and, as we saw already, this connection is not at all
sporadic. Neither it is a practical conjunction of the three rites, but a
process, full of the deep mystical meaning.
In The Symbol of Faith we confess ‘one baptism’ (unum
baptisma).This is a solemn statement of exclusivity of the baptism.
Apostle Paul tells clearly about it to the Ephesians: ‘one Lord, one
faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and
through all and in all.’ (Eph 4:5-6). In the same way as we confess
that our Lord founded only one Church, we also confess that there is
only one baptism; for the Holy Trinity, in which name we are
65
baptized according to the Redeemer’s command (Matt 28:19), is

One and indivisible. That is why the Church does not renew baptism,
when She takes repented heretics - who have been baptized in the
name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit - into Her fold,
according to the 7th canon of the 2nd universal Council of 381.
‘Validity’ of the baptism in this case is determined by the correct
procedure of the sacrament in relation to the content and the form,
on the one hand, and by the affiliation of the person, who carried the
rite of baptism, to a Christian congregation confessing the primary
dogma about the Holy Trinity, on the other hand. The baptism is not
renewed, if a Christian has renounced her faith, but later asked the
Church to be taken back in Her fold. For the God’s seal on every
Christian is irreversible: son’s action does not break his connection
with his father, as well as many sins and all their weight do not
abolish those possibilities, given through the baptism. The way of
redemption is always open, and God reminds us about it in the
parable about the prodigal son.
Baptism is a unique moment in the life of a human, because
through the sacrament the baptised is justified for God, and not due
to her own merits, but due to reconciliation and redemption, brought
by the Redeemer. The curse that had been gravitating over humanity
after the original sin, was lifted up by the sacrifice of the Incarnated
Word. To be baptised is to become a part of the renewed humanity
with Christ as the head of it and the New Adam. But what we gain
in Christ is freedom in the full meaning of the word - that is, the
possibility of a choice. In the moment of Christian consecration the
66
Divine grace is poured out upon us, but our task is to increase gifts
given to us. If we do not do so, God’s wrath will fall upon us as the
gospel parable teaches us. For to one, who fulfils God’s
commandments, the unspoken mysteries of co-existence with the
Divine are promised (2 Peter 1:4), and this is the final aim of
everyone, who ‘were baptized in Christ’.
67
The Eleventh and The Twelfth Elements

I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the
world to come. Amen.
We have already told about, what important place

eschatology - or the orientation toward the ‘end’ of the world - has
in the Christian teaching. To forget about it would mean an
intentional distortion of the evangelic Gospel, it would reduce
Revelation down to a kind of a conformist ethic. While the
resurrection from the dead was a nonsense for the Hellenistic
philosophy, because it understood time as a cyclic notion; the
Christian teaching, which had learned the linear character of the
time from the Bible, sees in the resurrection from the dead a
justification of the history. If we look more attentive at the Plato’s
idea about soul’s immortality, we will see, that it is rather far from
the Christian dogma about human’s life in the time that comes.
The Symbol of Faith uses a particular expression ‘I look for
the resurrection of the dead’. In Greek it is expressed by the verbum
prosdokomen/προσδοκώµεν, which has a double meaning. On the
one side, it expresses a subjective expectation of the believers, an
echo of which we can find in the Revelation (‘[…] Come, Lord
Jesus!’ Rev 22:20); on the other side, it conveys an objective
factum: the resurrection from the dead will inevitably happen.
The resurrection from the dead is not simply a pious hope -
this is an absolute credibility, which stipulates faith of the Christians.
68
While it looks strange to the pagans (Acts 17:32), it was natural for
the most of the Jews (John 11:24). It had been substantiated in The
Old Testament (look for example in Ezekiel 37:1-14). The new in
the Christian faith was the factum that the blissful resurrection from
the dead is connected with the redemptive work of Jesus Christ.
‘[…] I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will
live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in
Me will never die […]’ (John 11:25-26). Therefore apostle Paul
writes to the Thessalonians: ‘Brothers, we do not want you to be
uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you will not
grieve like the rest, who are without hope’ (1 Thess 4:13). The
Christian teaching is truly a religion of hope, therefore there is
nothing common between firmness of martyrs and a tranquillity of
the antique sages in the face of an inevitable end. And how moving
in its contended assurance is the pray of St. martyr Polycarp on the
fire: ‘Lord God Almighty, Father of Jesus Christ, Your beloved and
blissed Son, through Whom we have learned to know You; God of
angels and powers, God of every creature and of whole family of the
righteous, living in Your presence: I bless You, for You honoured
me at this day and hour to be ranked among Your martyrs and to
drink from Your Christ’s cup, so I could resurrect into the eternal
life by my soul and body in incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit’.
Niceano-Constantinople Creed tells about ‘resurrection from
the dead’, the ancient Roman Creed tells about ‘resurrection of the
flesh’ in order to stress literal meaning of the event. Though, the
notion ‘flesh’ should be understood in the meaning ‘person’, for we
69
know well, that ‘[…] flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of
God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.’ (1 Cor 15:50).
Resurrection to the eternal life suggests a transformation, a passage
from the perishable to the imperishable (ibid 51-54). Apostle Paul
clearly states after whole passage of deliberations about how the
resurrection will happen: ‘It is sawn a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body […]’ (ibid 44). There is no doubt, that the body
resurrected and the body buried are one and the same person, but the
modus of their existence is different. To comprehend this, one
should keep in mind, what the category of the spiritual, connected
with the category of the Divine, means for apostle Paul. The
spiritual body is the body transformed by grace: ‘For as in Adam all
die, so in Christ all will be made alive.’ (1 Cor 15:22), the
resurrected Christ is ‘[…] the firstfruits of those who have fallen
asleep.’ (ibid 20). All life of the Christian must be filled with this
assurance, therefore the believers should conduct themselves in this
world as ‘children of light’ (Eph 5:8). Participation in the Holy
Eucharist/ευχαριστία is a security of the eternal life, and the liturgy
often reminds us about it. Maybe it is precisely in the sacrament of
Eucharist the eschatological moment is stressed most of all. Down-
pouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Holy Gifts in the moment of
epiclesis41 transforms Pentecost into the present and foreshadows
the victory of the Second Coming. The connection with Pentecost
from the one side, and with the Second Coming from the other, is
specially stressed in the Eastern liturgy. First of all, the Saturday
41
From Greek επίκληση/call or invocation (From translator)
70
before Pentecost is devoted to the dead, and the kneeling prayer

during the evening service of the Sunday fest of Pentecost contains
an anticipation of the Common Resurrection: ‘We confess Your
grace in all at our entrance into this world and at our exit, with the
hope of resurrection and the imperishable life. Inaugurated by Your
true promise, we will also participate in Your future Second
Coming’.
In the Universal Resurrection, which concludes the world
history, Christians see first of all a manifestation of the victory of
Christ, the truly harbinger of which was Lord’s Resurrection in the
dawn of the third day. But ‘the Day of Lord’ will be also the
Judgement Day. We know that everybody will ‘[…] come out –
those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who
have done evil to the resurrection of judgement.’ (John 5:29). It will
be the final separation of the good seeds from the chaff. No other
but Lord Himself ought to carry this separation, and it will happen at
the Last Judgement. Then it will be not a mixture of good and evil
any more, for nothing impure can enter the Kingdom, and it will not
be possible any more to change anything in human’s faith. On the
other side of time only that will remain, which is not a subject for
change. Judgement is an eternal removal from God. Due to the
God’s Providence human’s purpose is the transfiguration,
deification, union with God. In ‘the century of the future’ everything
that was removed from God will be considered given to death. This
will be the second death - that death, about which St. John the
Theologian tells in the Book of Revelation (Rev 20:14). This death
71
means God’s oblivion. Those, who did not wish to know God, they
will not be recognized any more. Those, who knew Him and served
Him, will shine in an unspeakable and never quenching glory.
The Symbol of Faith begins with the solemn affirmation of
the faith in God. This affirmation is not only intellectual act, it
requires the whole involvement of the soul and a reciprocal return.
Life of the believer is transformed in Christ through the Holy Ghost,
because Christian, though living in ‘this world’, is not ‘of this
world’. Her mind is turned toward the Kingdom of light, that is why
The Symbol of Faith concludes with the joyful confession of an
expectation of resurrection and of life in the coming time, where it
will be ‘no sickness, no sorrow, no sighs’.
72
About authors
Archbishop of New York Peter (Paul L’Huillier) (1926-2007) is
known through his popular work: Peter L’Huillier, The Church of
the Ancient Councils: the Disciplinary Work of the First Four
Ecumenical Councils. Crestwood, New-York: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, New York, 1996.
Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky (1903-1958) is known for his books

on the Orthodox systematic theology: The mystical theology of the
Eastern Church; James Clarke & Co, Cambridge, 2005 and
Dogmatic Theology. Creation, God's Image in Man, & the
Redeeming Work of the Trinity; St. Vladimir's Seminary Press,
New York, 2017.
Translated by Mihail Chipitsyn, cand.theol.

2021 Århus, Denmark

Interpretation of The Symbol of Faith-A5

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Interpretation

translated from Russian by Mihail Chipitsyn

Creed, The Symbol of Faith.............................................. 1

The First Element ............................................................ 10

The Second Element ........................................................ 14

The Third Element .......................................................... 20

The Fourth Element ........................................................ 26

The Fifth Element ............................................................ 31

The Sixth Element ........................................................... 36

The Seventh Element....................................................... 42

The Eighth Element......................................................... 49

The Ninth Element .......................................................... 56

The Tenth Element .......................................................... 62

The Eleventh and The Twelfth Elements ...................... 68

This Interpretation covers history of creation of the

Mihail Chipitsyn, Cand.theol., Århus 2021

Creed, The Symbol of Faith

The Ninth In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Hence, it is necessary to study all twelve elements of The

probably Jerusalem church – was reworked by theologians, who had

symbols out, baptismal and councils’ alike. The 6th Ecumenical

Symbolum Nicæno- Symbolum Nicaeno-

[The First Element]

[The Second Element]

πρὸ πάτρων τῶν αἰώνων, saecula,

[The Third Element]

[The Fourth Element]

[The Fifth Element]

[The Sixth Element]

[The Seventh Element]

[The Eighth Element]

[The Ninth Element]

µίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ unam, sanctam, catholicam et

[The Tenth Element]

[The Eleventh and The Twelfth Elements]

The First Element

God of the Christian revelation, God of the Holy Scripture,

God. This expression gains meaning only in relation to the created

The Second Element

There is some apparent disproportion in the Creed: to the

humanity in our Lord Jesus Christ raises the question of correlation

nature. When Christians became sons of God in Christ through

between the Son and the Father is expressed in following words:

The Third Element

If the Second Element of The Symbol of Faith tells about

The Third Element of The Symbol of Faith is an echo of

The Incarnation is an event that has no equal in the history

the definition of this element of The Symbol of Faith is in

borrowed from apostle Paul (Phil 2:7), because Christ in His

The Fourth Element

The task of redemption, which had been accomplished by

Resurrection revealed His victory, then His death on the Cross

from the suffering, descended to us by your humanity and ascended

responsible for his sin. The process of reconciliation was

The Fifth Element

Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the heart of the

scepticism. (Acts 17:16-34). Precise therefor the majority of Hebrew

very moment of the Resurrection of the Lord escapes any human

The Sixth Element

By proclaiming redeeming work of our Lord after the

otherwise other proclamations of the Holy Scripture would miss

redemption offered by Jesus Christ. God offers the redemption, but

The Seventh Element

Believe in Christ’s Second Coming is one of the undeniable