Can You Hear The 12 Drummers?

You can’t live through many Christmas seasons without hearing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” You remember … “seven swans a swimming, six geese a laying, five golden riiiiiiiigs.”

(By the way, the twelve days of Christmas refers to the period between December 25th and January 6th. For many centuries, Christians exchanged gifts on January 6th, or Epiphany.

December 25th was the first day of Christmas and was usually celebrated at midnight on the 24th, in a Christ –mass. Thus, the English word “Christmas.”)

I had mentioned in an earlier blog about the old legend connected to this carol; the story that it was written during a time when it was against the law to practice Roman Catholicism in England. The legend claims that English Catholics used the carol as a mini-catechism (which is a method of teaching theology.)

Each line of the song was supposed to stand for some important doctrine.

The legend claims that the line about the “twelve drummers drumming” stood for the Apostles’ Creed.

What a great story!

I so much want it to be true.

True or not, believers must train their ears to hear the “twelve drummers drumming.” Otherwise we will never learn how to march to the rhythm of the apostles.

In contemporary culture, it has become increasingly difficult to hear the steady beat of our faith. The ancient beat gets drowned out by all the noise of contemporary life.

We also know that if we really do decide to march to the ancient beat of the twelve drummers, we are going to look very different than the people around us.

All of us – even Christians – are more naturally in step with the unbelieving crowd around us than we are with the apostles. The rhythm of those twelve drummers is so alien (when compared to the rhythms of contemporary life) that it requires a serious commitment to listen and adjust our movements to match their teachings.

I decided to dedicate my blogs to doctrine for a year because I wanted to keep my sermons and thoughts in tune with “that which has at all times and in all places been believed by the whole people of God.” I am growing anxious that I will end up with three readers – two of them being family members who disagree with me! I wonder how many believers are really interested in exploring the foundations of their faith.

But that’s hardly the point, is it?

If I am trying to serve those who are searching for the faith “once and for all delivered to the saints,” then this exercise is certainly worth my time.

I need to remember – and I hope you will – that a study of doctrine can only become spiritually profitable, if it is much more than an intellectual exercise.

To gain anything spiritual from the study of theology, we must have a humble heart and a yearning for God.

Some of history’s greatest minds have dedicated themselves to the study of Christian theology. Nonetheless, theology cannot degenerate into a mere intellectual exercise. We must approach God’s Word “with our shoes removed,” as it were. We must approach the intellectual history of God’s Church believing, in spite of all the nasty stuff we encounter there, that the Church is what St. Paul claimed: “the pillar and ground of truth.”

Only with such attitudes will we have ears to hear and, by God’s grace, the courage to understand and obey, the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. Only then will our lives become seriously impacted by the things we learn.

On December 14th, 1591, a Spanish poet and a mystic named St. John of the Cross, died. I disagree with several things he taught. I love his poetry though. John of the Cross’s grounding in Christian theology pours through nearly every poem. For him, doctrine and devotion ought to form a single pattern of life that works to bring one’s thoughts, actions, and art into harmony with Christ.

I am concluding my blog today with the Apostle’s Creed to help all of us do that same thing.

Please note that although in our church, we usually use the word “Christian” instead of “catholic” when we recite the creed, we do so in order to avoid the backlash of those who assume that “catholic” means “Roman Catholic.” The words original sense is important to the meaning of the creed however (and no other word fully communicates what the fathers intended) so I am sending the creed in its most standard and accepted form.

I would hope that those who have not memorized the creed will do so and then think about what each line says to you. As these blogs continue, you will be able to follow my thoughts as I meander my way through the central beliefs of the Christian faith.



I believe in God the Father Almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth;


And in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord;

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell;

the third day He rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,

and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.


I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. Amen.

Hey! I Thought You Said....

I was not blessed with immaculate perception. I read and understand the Bible through a set of lenses that color its pages and ideas.

Between me and the text are personal experiences, customs, sectarian biases, and the era of history in which I was born and raised.

You are in the same boat! Even if you claim to read it just like it’s written!

No; especially if you claim that!

My mind restructures the word of God as I read it.

Reading is never a passive exercise. To some extent, we all shape the ideas of a book as we read them.

When I realized that I was doing that to the Bible, I decided to weigh my personal perception against the teachings held in common by God’s people through the ages.

If the church is indeed the “pillar and ground of truth,” as St. Paul claimed, I can trust the teachings that had endured age after age and culture after culture. I can trust those teachings more than I can trust my own limited viewpoint.

Keeping this in mind is easier said than done! As time has passed though, I have discovered that this way of reading the Bible is a place where all believers can meet.

A church like mine, where people come from all parts of the body of Christ, can build doctrinal unity on this common deposit of faith.

This conviction – that we should evaluate our private, sectarian, and cultural views of the faith by a common core of beliefs – has become deeply head conviction. That is why I make a big ado about the Apostles Creed. I believe the doctrines of this creed to be the steady beat of the apostles – the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints.”

The creeds have a history of their own and I enjoy talking about it. However, for our purposes here, it is enough to say that they arose from pastoral concerns. A believer coming from paganism, for example, needed to know that One God created the world, that sin had entered that world and that Jesus Christ had come to reconcile us to God.

There would be no bibles for centuries. Scrolls of various biblical books were scattered here and there with no known way to bind them together – much less to make them available for everyone.

Beginning with the Bishop of Antioch, in about AD 98, church leaders began to find ways to teach the people statements of faith that would help them retain the basic beliefs of Christianity. They formed these statements in poetic ways so they could be memorized, sung, and prayed. These “poems” were soon used in public worship. We call those doctrinal poems "creeds" because the first word is the Latin word "credo," which means, "I believe."

The first and most important of these creeds is called the Apostles’ Creed. Christians were quoting it extensively by the second century. A couple of centuries later, the church fathers added the Nicene Creed to the Christian arsenal of faith. Christians everywhere, with all our differences, still accept the doctrines contained in these creeds.

Therefore, we can say that the creeds express the common doctrinal heritage of all followers of Christ. They teach what C. S. Lewis called, “Mere Christianity.”

What is Mere Christianity?

At Christmas, Baptists, Pentecostals and Roman Catholics sing the same songs.

Most of the time, we hardly know that we have anything in common. We can’t receive communion together, we baptize differently, and man, do we ever sing different songs!

At Christmas however, of that all changes. We visit each other’s churches. We enjoy the sermons, dramas and music in all sorts of churches.

So why are Christians so different one from another during the rest of the year?

Well, we’re not really that different. It’s just that some groups are old and maintain forms of worship and musical styles from centuries past. Others are new and create new forms of worship based on musical styles from contemporary cultural environment. Many churches are based on ethnic backgrounds that mold the expression of faith in ways that seem strange to outsiders.

What Christian often argue about is the difference between eternal values (things that must not change) and temporal values (things that change from culture to culture and age to age). Is the way we celebrate Holy Communion a Biblically-mandated issue or a time and cultural thing? How about sermons? Or pastors, for that matter.

I doubt that I can settle any of those things in this blog!

What I can do is identify the core beliefs that unite all Christians. Those are the things at the core of the covenant God made with His people.

It is irresponsible to even call oneself a Christian without knowing them.

So, what are they?

Ahh, glad you asked! After all, many believers no longer know what they are. They are even surprised that it matters.

Most of you reading probably attend a non-denominational church. So it might surprise you to know that churches like these are quite new. Non-denominational churches tend to be independent and made up of believers from every conceivable background.

A young, independent congregation does not offer a common root system to its people. Therefore, it tends to be cautious about doctrine. The unity of such churches is built on an unspoken compromise. The believers in them have enjoyed a generation of unity because they once decided not to discuss doctrinal differences. The problem is, most of them have now come to the time when they must decide what to teach their children, or to their new converts.

C. S. Lewis called the common core of faith, those beliefs that we recognize together (especially at Christmas time) “Mere Christianity.” Previous generations called those common beliefs “orthodoxy.”

How they came to be identified is interesting.

Even during the lifetime of the apostles, Christians often disagreed among themselves about how to interpret the Scriptures or to explain the nature of Christ. Such differences led to divisions and strife.

Believers began to hold special meetings (called councils) to settle their divisions. Churches from all parts of the Mediterranean sent representatives to these counsels in order to define their common faith.

You can read the minutes of the very first church council! They are recorded in Acts, chapter 15. St. Luke sums up the spirit of that meeting by remarking, “There was no small dissension!” (I bet! I have been in some of those kinds of meetings!)

Over the next few centuries, Christians would call several more councils. They would decide such things as which writings would be included in the New Testament, which Jewish practices would or would not be retained in Christian worship and what they would teach about Jesus Christ.

Through the centuries, the overwhelming majority of Christians have agreed with the decisions of these early church councils made. They have stood the test of time. They have become the common heritage of all believers. They are the things we sing about during Christmas.

You can learn the vocabulary of orthodox Christianity in a few hours. In fact, you can do that just by memorizing the two great creeds. However, defining the meanings of these beliefs, deciding how they should impact everyday life and what level of authority one grants to them– that’s another thing!

All Christians believe in the “communion of saints,” for example. But the phrase means something very different to a Roman Catholic than it does to a Southern Baptist! To acknowledge “one baptism for the remission of sins,” takes us into arguments about the meaning of the word “for!”

So Christian creeds both celebrate our unity and expose our differences.

(Sigh)

But leave all of that for the other months! This is the season to smile at one another as we go into our various churches.

We know that one service will open with a pipe organ and the other with a guitar; that one will involve dance and the other silence; that one will be held in a warehouse and the other in a cathedral. But during advent we also know that these are surface matters. They conceal a massive body, consisting of the living and the dead, gathered from every tribe and nation under heaven.

The guitar strums. The pipe organ bellows. For a moment the voices of a boys choir in their while robes join with the voices of young people in jeans:

“Oh Come Let Us Adore Him, Christ the Lord!”