The Creed of Christendom

By Matthew Jacobs

The Creed of Christendom offers a means of stability for the modern world. In the face of ever-increasing skepticism in the secular culture of Western civilization as well as seeming indifference to the fractured nature of "Christianity" among Protestants, this book argues that following the story of how reason came to its climax—becoming its most mature and true self—when married to faith in the High Middle Ages not only stability but a restoration and advancement can be made of the greatest civilization the world has ever known: Christendom, that civilization based upon the Incarnation of God among men and its worldview articulated from that center of all human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ThomasDismas
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223294726

Book preview

The Creed of Christendom

The Stability of the Creed in a Creedless World

Matthew Jacobs

Biblical quotations are taken from the

Douay-Rheims Version 1899 American Edition unless otherwise noted

Biblical quotations marked LXX are taken from the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament

Biblical quotations marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright ©2007

Biblical quotations marked NAB are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition ©2010

Biblical quotations Marked RSV are taken from The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright ©1965, 1966 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America

Published by Matthew Jacobs at Smashwords

Copyright ©2023 Matthew Jacobs

Cover design by Marion Strickland

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to our Incarnate Lord who, in effect, prayed for a Unified Christian World—for Christendom (Jn.17:20-23)

Preface

How can the ordinary educated person discover and then live by the truth amid the numerous claims to the truth? In the midst of the hundreds of claims to have the truth—or those who promote disclaimers to the effect that one cannot discover and thus live by the truth—what is the ordinary person to do to sift his way through it all? It was questions like these, which I’ve now contemplated for some years, which prompted the writing of this book. It was the innumerable conversations with ordinary—from the most educated to the least—folks, folks struggling to find their way to the way, which inspired me with an overwhelming desire to articulate the way to sure Wisdom and Truth.

Within these pages I claim confidently and yet humbly to have mapped the basic outline to finding this sure way to Wisdom and Truth. No, I don’t assert to have ensconced the totality of what can be known in a 250 page book. Rather, all our knowledge, finite as it can only ever be, originates in our senses as our uniquely human capacity to reason takes the sensory data and builds a system of knowledge. Consequently, if we trek the path that human reason itself has trod in history, following it wherever it leads until we see just when it becomes most fully itself, then—and only then—have we discovered the way to sure Wisdom and Truth. Having discovered this way, we will live by Wisdom and Truth. This is the story of Reason.

The Story of Reason finds its narrative climax in the greatest minds combining in various ways Reason and Faith (revelation from the one only God). What results is the Creed, that summary, codification and crystallization of knowledge both human and divine. This simultaneously human and divine Creed becomes the basis upon which the greatest civilization in the history of the world is built: Christendom. Hence the Creed of Christendom.

But the glory of Christendom wasn’t to last. Rebels rose up to fight against her. At first, they merely bifurcated Christendom into those who remained faithful to such civilization—faithful to the Creed which was the fruit of the marriage between Reason and Faith—on the one hand, and those who would lead Reason where they would go—trying to build another civilization while divorcing Reason from Faith and claiming loyalty only to the latter—on the other hand.

However, the Protestant Revolt led to the so-called Enlightenment period, wherein, again on the basis of the divorce of Reason from Faith, loyalty only to Reason was attempted. When this project failed, Post-modernism (the age in which we live now) was born. It claims loyalty to neither, and thus we now live in the Age of Flux, according to which the truth cannot be discovered and consequently cannot be lived.

Once we realize that we are all actors in the great Story of Reason and that Reason reached its zenith and full potential only in conjunction with Faith, we simultaneously realize our obligation to do all that we can in the here and now to restore and to advance the greatest marriage the world has ever known. To realize this is to assent to the Creed and seek to implement Christendom. In a word, it is to live the Creed of Christendom.

I thank, first and foremost, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is God Who has enabled me to thrive and excel, particularly in studying with a view to teaching others about the Incarnational Church-Kingdom in the face of my being imprisoned at the age of and ever since I was 16 years old.

Among humans, my mother, more than any other, has stood by my side these 12 1/2 long years, giving financial support as well as the touch that only a mother can give.

However, a great friend of mine, Marion Strickland, was pivotal in dialogue and in making the cover for the book. Specifically, The New Humanity chapter was written originally because, on the basis of my speaking quite frequently about such a possible future reality, he asked me to write it for him. Also, it was conversation with him, on a number of occasions, concerning just how it is that God is present in different ways throughout His creation that gave me the idea to write a piece on that reality, explaining in detail how it is that God can be present multifariously. It was his knowledge of story structure, which he imparted to me, that enabled me to write the Story of Reason, which is the backbone of this entire book. In general, without his encouragement to be the best that I can be, this my first book would not have been written.

Chris Cratin, another great friend, with whom I have spent many hours of dialogue as well, spent hours reading the manuscript and helping me to format my book for publishing. His insights for editing the manuscript, as always with a second pair of eyes, were invaluable for the end product.

Another very generous friend, Brett Prince, lit my passion afire to finish writing this my first book. He did this by completing his own first book, a cook book which incorporates a narrative serving as an apologetic for Southern Culture. The name of the book is Southern Style.

Needless to say for anyone who reads this book, it could not have been written had Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas never lived. This work is saturated in Thomism, and of course, Aquinas may have learned more from Augustine than the Bible (to exaggerate a bit). Their intercessory prayers I know have contributed to the writing of this work.

The Queen of all mothers, the Blessed Virgin Mary, has shown herself a Mother to me. Under her title—among the many there are—the Seat of Wisdom, I have appealed countless times, to increase wisdom within me, to lavish me in the grace of the Holy Trinity of which she is full (Lk.1:28).

So, what are you waiting for? Enter the Creed of Christendom.

Chapter 1

What is Christendom?

Historically Christendom was not a term used to refer to all professed Christians, cutting across and including all denominations, no matter the particular creeds and practices, beliefs and rituals. Neither did it mean those areas of the world—or sum total thereof considered as a unit—which were predominantly occupied by professed Christians of all kinds. Christendom, in our modern times, has become more or less synonymous with the term Christianity. But Christianity is itself a post-Reformation term, which conveys the idea of an opinion, a theory, something held tentatively. After the Reformation, the intellectuals had to come up with a term to signify the then fractured Christian world, and thus, this term, Christianity, was meant to convey the idea that there are various kinds or versions of believing and practicing the religion established by Jesus Christ. The term Christendom itself has been hijacked and given a meaning that obscures the grand historic reality which that word originally signified.

So what did Christendom originally signify, and more importantly, why does it even matter?

Christendom was a term coined in the High Middle Ages to signify the reality that had come to be through the consolidated efforts of popes and saints, missionaries and councils, theologians and philosophers, mystics and layfolk of all kinds. A Christian civilization (Christianitas in Lat.; Christianismos in Gk.; Christendom in Eng.) had emerged and made its imprint upon the world at large: abolition of slavery and cessation of inhumane entertainment (the colosseum), hospitals and universities, widespread recognition of the equality of all men and universal belief in one supreme God (thus extirpating Greco-Roman idolatry), codification of legal codes (such as the presumption of innocence) and the dawn of parliamentary governments, monasteries which served as hubs for educating classes of all kinds and monks who preserved by transcription all the knowledge of the ancient world.

Christendom was a civilization with the Christian faith at its foundation. But it was a full blown civilization. It had a structured government, a robust economy, political organization and banking, a unique architecture and a scientific view of the world in general. All of these facets—all of its dimensions simpliciter—were informed by what I call the Creed of Christendom. This Creed was its formal, defining characteristic. Apart from and without this Creed, its identity would simultaneously disappear and cease to exist. In proportion as a community, society, government, nation or civilization has this Creed, and lives it out faithfully and in accordance with its tenets and ramifications, it is stable and tending towards the proper supernatural end (goal) for this world, that is, this Creed affirms unhesitatingly that one supreme, simple, infinite, creator, providential and eschatological God exists and that He has an ultimate purpose for everything that He has brought into being. One essential feature of bringing that purpose to fruition is a civilization of human beings all subscribing to the same Creed, worshipping in a unitary way on the basis of that Creed and perfecting humanity as a whole in the light of that Creed.

Christendom matters because the purpose, meaning and fulfillment of each thing in this universe matters. Purpose, meaning and the proper fulfillment of each thing matters because we human beings matter, who can discern these things in ourselves and the cosmos as a whole. Human beings matter because God—the God of the Creed—matters and brought all things into existence precisely because He wanted everything—humans and angels, animals and plants, microbes and atoms—to matter with Him: that is, God alone ultimately matters or, in other words, is true, good and beautiful and wants every creature (everything created) to experience His truth, goodness and beauty with and in Him to the greatest possible degree that each thing can so experience, while retaining their specific identities. Only by re-establishing Christendom with its proper historic Creed can the one God’s ultimate plan for all things be effected.

So what is this Creed of Christendom?

What is not the Creed of Christendom?

At its root, a creed is the identity of any person, group, society, nation or civilization. Thus, at the very outset of the Protestant Revoltn1, there were scurries of the various sub-movements within this revolt to define not only what these persons believed but also who and what they were, to define their identity. The Augsburg Confession, the fruit of the labor of the theologian and philosopher Philipp Melanchthon, was an early summary of Lutheran identity, shortly followed by a number of other works, which culminated in The Book and Formula of Concord.  These works, crystallized in the latter mentioned work, were taken to be their creed.

The King of England, as is well known, pulled away from Rome for less than honorable reasons not to be named here. Through his efforts, utilizing chiefly Archbishop Cranmer and Queen Elizabeth, another creed was solidified to establish the Anglican Communion as a church distinct from ancient and venerable Christendom: the Thirty-nine Articles.

But far and away the most influential, the absolutely monumental—and tragically disastrous for Christendom—creed proposed by the Revolters was John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. This was a masterpiece of Protestant thought, what J.C. Olin referred to as the summa of Reformed Protestantism. This creed, far more than any other ever proposed by the Protestant movement, secured the immediate bifurcation of Christendom and ultimately its downfall.

The creeds, however, continued to multiply, a new one emerging, of course, every time a new group emerged claiming loyalty to Christ in some different sort of way. It is simply a brute philosophical truth that any group, to distinguish itself, must define itself—even if such definition is the refusal to define oneself—else it will lapse into non-identity, that is, non-existence.

In general, the attitude of Protestants towards their own creeds has varied nearly as much as their creeds themselves have varied from the Creed of Christendom and among each other’s creeds. Some have died for believing quite sincerely and wholeheartedly in their historically newfound identities, while others have taken it upon themselves to venture outside the articulated bounds of their respective creeds, sometimes being excommunicated, sometimes redefining their religious purviews and sometimes being received indifferently by those with whom they claim communion in spite of disagreement, all this being as clear as mud. It is clear, though, that the variegated creeds have served to uphold a barrier to the reunion of Christendom.n2

The culminating result, in one sense, was the rejection of creeds as divisive and destructive of the unity that Christ intended, prayed and died for: I allude to the so-called Restoration Movement of the 19th century led by Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, among others. But such was the culminating result for living Protestantism. Protestantism died with the advent of the nihilism and post-modernism of Nietzsche, which has come to dominate the cultural, political, religious, philosophical—in sum, civilizational—landscape. As the great Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc stated 85 years ago: ...doctrinal [creedal] Protestantism is dead.n3 To be sure, remnants remain. But in proportion as the remnants can be completely eradicated, the barrier to the reunion of Christendom can be eliminated, and the Creed of Christendom can gain the ascendancy once again.

It is a brute historical fact that the Creed of Christendom preceded the creedal chaos of the Protestant Revolt with all of its variations. It was this Creed that was the matrix of what we are calling Christendom. This Creed, therefore, is not—historically it cannot be—some sort of creedal commonality between the various churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. Rather, the Creed of Christendom was/is the body of teaching that was originally taught by Jesus of Nazareth, received authoritatively from him by specially chosen individuals called apostles, who ensured, in view of their deaths, the faithful transmission of this corpus of exact doctrine to posterity. They ensured this transmission by establishing a worldwide community of people with a structured organization, strict discipline and chain of authority that would safeguard the contents of this Creed so as to enable the perpetuation of the identity of this people from one generation to the next.

The Creed of Christendom in General

The first thing to note about the Creed of Christendom is that everything it affirmed revolved around the historicity of certain key events, i.e., the affirmation that certain things had happened in history, at a particular time and in a particular place(s) was fundamental for all those who accepted this Creed (who I also refer to for brevity’s sake as Creeders). Thus, the idea that this Creed comes from myth in the sense of an ungroundedness in history, truth, and the space-time universe is ill-founded. These key events that were foundational for the existence of this people’s identity were, they believed, such as to constitute a new order of things, admittedly not from this world but nevertheless radically for this world, to transform this world, not into something else alien to this world; rather, they were to transform this world into more of what it is supposed to be, to perfect and complete this world. The key event, the apogee of the entire world’s history—so the Creed of Christendom argues—is the Incarnation of God among men. It was believed, contrary to anything any person in history had ever believed to have happened before that God—not some god among many other gods but the one and only true God—had become a man.

For all Creeders this event—the Incarnation—contains, as in a seed, the meaning and purpose of all things past, present and future. To start with, however, as St. Gregory of Nazianzus eloquently said concerning the Incarnation, What is not assumed is not healed. Stated positively, this says that Whatever is assumed is healed. The first major ramification of the Incarnation of God among men—the tree resulting from the seed—is the rectification (the making straight) of crooked humanity. God assumed human nature in toto, so that human nature may be redeemed, perfected, completed and elevated in toto. God became man so that men may become gods, said St. Athanasius.

What quickly became evident from the teaching of God among men in the person of Jesus of Nazareth was that He was not alone in the category of persons existing as the one true God. In other words, there was more than one person who existed as the one true God. He repeatedly claimed to have been sent from the person whom he called Father.n4 In addition, He promised to send another person from the Godhead, who was called the Spirit and Paracleten5 (variously translated ‘advocate,’ ‘counselor’ etc.).  And these were all claimed to have been verified as historical events, events that happened in history, in space-time. The eternal Word and Son of God claimed, in history, that He was sent from the Father, and Jesus claimed, in history, that He would send the Spirit (the third person of this Tri-personal God) to empower His apostles to start a community for which He had very specific and global plans, and His apostles claimed that this happened in history on the feast day of the Jews called Pentecost, a mere 50 days after this Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and raised from the dead in history. But what was so significant—if anything—about there being a plurality of persons existing as one supreme God?

To explain the full significance of this view of God, let us back up for one moment. This God who was believed to have become man was the simultaneously transcendent and immanent God, utterly unlike the gods popularly conceived by the pagan nations at large. You see, this God was not some finite deity like Zeus or Apollo that had been born at some point in the past and that could be killed or altered in any kind of way. These various deities were often described in widely known myths as coming down and taking on the form of a man or other creature for some limited time—in other words, shape-shifting. However, it was never actually believed that these deities became—while retaining their divine nature—a human being.

This God of Christendom to be was transcendent: in terms of His nature, this God was utterly distinct from and other than the world. This same God was also immanent: in terms of His activity, He was always upholding the world in existence, for He alone really and actually has Being to give. You see, whereas even among the Jews, the one true God had been described—sometimes, certainly not always—accurately by certain humans giving Him names, this God had also given Himself a name, which didn’t merely describe Him but named Him as what He was in Himself. In Exodus 3:14, after Moses, a descendant of Abraham who had been specially chosen by God to effect His plan in this world, has been chosen by God to deliver and lead out from slavery under Egypt’s Pharaoh God’s chosen people, the Israelites, God, in order to provide Moses with the name of the God who has sent him to rescue them, says this: And God spoke to Moses, saying, I am THE BEING; and he said, Thus shall ye say to the children of Israel, THE BEING has sent me to you (Ex. 3:14 LXX, emphasis original).

This awesome God, the very fountain and wellspring of all existence itself, had, according the Creed of Christendom, finally and decisively acted to save humanity, pulling it up by its own bootstraps, as it were. For this God didn’t just look down from its lofty abode in some other-worldly realm and pluck man from his filthy and worthless existence to now enjoy the God’s paradisiacal existence. No, this was the same God who had created everything—from the lowliest of particles and atoms, to microbes and plants, to animals and rational animals (humans, made to His image and likeness). He had taken on human nature in its full polyphony, confirming it to be inherently good—it came from Him; it could only be good—and thus ratifying humanity as a race—literally giving Divine sanction to human existence. The Incarnation makes clear that every human person deserves to live life to the fullest (cp. Jn.10:10). The obvious implication of the Incarnation is that a civilization of humans ought to be built that brings into reality the version of humanity that the one true God approved of by His Incarnation: an Incarnational civilization. But how could God—THE BEING—ensure that such a reality would be brought into existence?

Let us go ahead and nip in the bud a myth that has emerged in these late days, namely, that there is no way God ensured that such a reality would be brought to fruition, other than that that same Incarnate God—the same Lord Jesus Christ—would one day return to set all things the way that they are supposed to be, to establish the truly just order of things (cp. 2Pet.3:13). Rather, all Creeders from the very beginning believed that the community the Incarnate Lord had founded would be the way that such a just order of things would be brought into the world, a world brought down from heaven to earth (cp. Rev.21). In general, it was believed as a tenet of the Creed itself, that the virtuous conduct of the continuing Incarnation on earth (for that is how this community identified itself, as continuing God’s presence here on earth—not of its own power, of course, but through God indwelling it in various ways) would usher in the coming of the Incarnate Lord back to earth to transform it in a definitive manner. Conversely, the vicious activity of Christians would hinder the final consummation of all things in terms of a just heaven and earth. In proportion as Creeders practice virtue and avoid vice is the extent to which heaven and earth are drawn together; in proportion as Creeders fail to extirpate vice and implement the new creation in the old is the extent to which heaven and earth are driven apart and the final consummation is hindered.

This Creed then, from its very inception was an embryonic civilization. It was based on a view of God as creator, as Incarnational and thus just, and at His very core personal. This last point needs to be stressed just a little more, for person is a concept that is peculiarly Christian. Because of its struggle to define itself as a community based on belief in a deity that is at once three and one, this Incarnational community, utilizing the philosophical treasury of the Greeks, redefined the vocabulary stock of all humanity when it defined person as essentially relational.

At the foundation of Christendom is the belief in a God who is three persons in one nature. Christendom emerged when, with a single sweeping stroke, person was defined in order to define the Incarnational family itself and simultaneously relation was identified as the most real of all things. In proportion as it is attempted to found, implement, order and live out a civilization based on person and relation as they flow out from and are dependent upon the historical event of the Incarnation of God, Christendom emerges and brings all things into Incarnational order.

Joseph Ratzinger expounds at length upon the origin of the concept person, and its significance in the ancient world: In the struggle over the language of the profession of faith [Creed of Christendom], the struggle over the thing itself was settled, so that in this language, inadequate as it may be, contact with the reality does take place. We can say from the history of ideas that it was here that the reality ‘person’ was first fully sighted; the only way that the concept and idea of ‘person’ dawned on the human mind was in the struggle over the Christian image of God and the interpretation of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. If we try to test the intrinsic suitability of our formula while bearing these points in mind, we find that it was imposed by two basic premises. First, it was clear that, seen absolutely, God is only One, that there is not a plurality of divine principles. Once this has been established, it is also clear that the oneness lies on the plane of substance; consequently the three-ness that must also be mentioned is not to be sought here. It must therefore exist on a different level, on that of relation, of the ‘relative.’... With the insight that, seen as substance, God is One but that there exists in him the phenomenon of dialogue, of differentiation, and of relationship through speech, the category of relation gained a completely new significance for Christian thought. To Aristotle [and the whole of the ancient world], it was among the ‘accidents’, the chance circumstance of being, which are separate from substance, the sole sustaining form of the real. The experience of the God who conducts a dialogue, of the God who is not only logos but also dia-logos, not only idea and meaning but speech and word in the reciprocal exchanges of partners in conversation—this experience exploded the ancient division of reality into substance, the real thing, and accidents, the merely circumstantial. It now became clear that the dialogue, the relation, stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being.... Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.n6

It was a revolution indeed—a revolution which the Christians called Christendom. It was a revolution which brought forth a civilization in which the glory of God shined with a clarity and brightness never seen before or after. The illumination upon the world was so bright that, seemingly, it blinded many who were unworthy of its splendor, such that those many either willingly or unwillingly forgot it, or corresponding far better to what we know from history, feigned ignorance and consequently spurned and calumniated the glory of Christendom.

The Glory of Christendom

"The question about the Middle Ages...not a single Medieval historian that I know, and I know quite a lot of them, would ever regard the Middle Ages as the ‘Dark Ages,’ and yet, this image and stereotype persists. Despite the tracing and persistent, albeit diminished influence, of ancient imperial institutions, practices and patterns of life for centuries after the classic date of the fall of Rome in 476, in this portrayal, it’s almost as if society and culture fell