I provided David Ker with a Hippopotamus, but what he really wanted was a creed that would fit in a Tweet.
In particular, he provided the following particulars:
If someone sincerely confessed this creed you would:
- Consider them to be a brother or sister in Christ.
- Believe that they are true believers and inheritors of eternal life.
Now I have a few problems with this, one of which is that I’m a distinctly non-creedal person. I have a personal creed in which I believe, but my major test of fellowship is whether the person wants fellowship with me.
Normally my statement of what is the one fundamental of Christian would come from 1 John 4 as David already suggested, “Jesus come in the flesh.” The incarnation is for me a non-negotiable. But as I read the requirement that I regard a person as a brother or sister in Christ, a “true believer”, or an inheritor of eternal life. Because I like to be consistent, at least occasionally, I must also run this past my post on my Threads blog in which I wrote against the idea that believe in a particular set of facts results in salvation.
That leads me to two other places in scripture. The first is the father seeking healing for his son in Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” The second is Luke 23:42, the thief on the cross, who says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
The first is 34 characters and the second is 51 characters. Neither speaker understood very much about theology, as best as I can tell, and more importantly than my view, both were accepted by Jesus, surely a greater testimony to the quality of their words than mine!
I’m sorry, however, to break the chain, but I absolutely refuse to nominate anyone. If you read this and would like to take a stab at this, consider yourself nominated. If you comment, I’ll move the link up into the post, so you can have free link love if you choose to regard yourself as nominated.
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Lots of people are waffling on this one. And with good reason. I like the thief on the cross option. An unbeliever told me once that if some catastrophe or the second return happened he thought he’d have just enough time to shout “Jesus Christ” and he thought that might get him past the gate…
I am still satisfied with the 9 character version I put in a comment on David’s blog, in response to what I inferred to be a challenge to write a 9 character creed: “LordJesus”.
[...] creed, that is, one that was only 140 characters in length. I attempted it, as did a few others. But more interesting to me, were that some of these people refused altogether, or objected despite [...]