A a Christian knighthood which has embraced the Reformed Faith, the Bible is the rule and practice of our Order. Our Order is the oldest Christian Institution after the Church itself and we too rediscovered those Biblical truths at the Reformation and continue to defend true Christianity against all error and false doctrine, heresy, idolatry and infidelity. Any person seeking admission into the Ancient and Illustrious Order of Knights of Malta and St John of Jerusalem must be a member or adherent of a Protestant Church, have a sincere love and veneration for the Almighty Creator, a firm and steadfast belief in the existence and functions of the Holy Trinity as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed; in the Protestant doctrine of Salvation by Faith Alone, and in the Scriptures as the only rule of faith and practice.
Apostles’ Creed (Symbolum Apostolorum). A statement of Christian belief that is used by Western churches, it reflects traditions that were affirmed officially by the entire Church in the Nicene Creed. Although its roots are much earlier, in its present form it dates to about the eighth century. When our Order was formed in 1048 AD Christian Europe was under the rule of Rome, it would be another almost 500 years before the light of the reform shone. However one of the first challenges the Order faced was to gain its independence from the Papacy.
This was granted on 15th July, 1113, when Pope Pascal II, realised that the Church needed a military order such as the Knights Hospitallers in the Holy Land and accepted their demands for independence. He confirmed the rules they had drawn up, and granted them permission to elect his successor Grand Master, by their own votes, without the interference of any temporal or spiritual power whatever. He further granted them exemption from the obligation of paying tithes to the Patriarch, and confirmed all the donations made, or to be made to them. Here ended the authority of the Pope over the Order. From this time till the present the Order has been free from all authority, spiritual or temporal. They here became a law unto themselves, and they acknowledged no other, in so far as the Order was concerned. As citizens of the several countries, they were of course amenable to their country’s laws, but were always ready to resist ungodly princes and prelates. This separation was a precedent for the later Reformation and in due course gave many knights the personal, legal and spiritual freedom to embrace the Reformed faith. It is also the basis for separate Protestant branches of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
The knights of the Order preserved Holy Scripture down through the centuries and were to the fore in its protection and then translation into the common tongue. It was natural then that black knights of Malta were amongst the first to embrace and defend the doctrines of the Reformers.
Sola scriptura was the rallying cry of the Protestant Reformation. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church had made its traditions superior in authority to the Bible. This resulted in many practices that were in fact contradictory to the Bible.
Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church and father of the Protestant Reformation, was publicly rebuking the Catholic Church for its unbiblical teachings. The Catholic Church threatened Martin Luther with excommunication (and death) if he did not recant. Martin Luther’s reply was, “Unless therefore I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture, or by the clearest reasoning, unless I am persuaded by means of the passages I have quoted, and unless they thus render my conscience bound by the Word of God, I cannot and will not retract, for it is unsafe for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other; may God help me! Amen!”
These Reformed Doctrines stand alongside the old Creeds of the Early Christian Church as the statement of our faith and practice. The authority and all sufficiency of Scripture as the revealed authoritative Word of the Living God is the foundation of our faith and practice. It is the basis of what we believe and we are guided daily by it. The Bible is the basis our eternal hope, it is the guide for our daily living it forms the inspiration for our degrees and rituals it is the core of our crusading and our convocations are opened and closed with its study.
The Biblical Basis for our Creed
The Apostles Creed is an agreed summary of the teachings of Holy Scripture. An early version of what later became the Apostles’ Creed, called the “Old Roman Creed,” was in use as early as the second century (Kelly, Creeds, 101). The earliest written form of this creed is found in a letter that Marcellus of Ancyra wrote in Greek to Julius, the bishop of Rome, about AD 341. About 50 years later, Tyrannius Rufinus wrote a commentary on this creed in Latin (Commentarius in symbolum apostolorum).
In it, he recounted the viewpoint that the apostles wrote the creed together after Pentecost, before leaving Jerusalem to preach (Symb. 2). The title “Apostles’ Creed” is also mentioned about 390 by Ambrose, where he refers to “the creed of the Apostles which the Church of Rome keeps and guards in its entirety” (Ep. 42, trans. in Saint Ambrose: Letters).
The text of the Old Roman Creed is as follows, with the last phrase (included by Marcellus but omitted by Rufinus) in brackets (Kelly, Creeds, 102):
I believe in God the Father almighty;
and in Christ Jesus His only Son, our Lord,
Who was born from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried,
on the third day rose again from the dead,
ascended into heaven,
sits at the right hand of the Father,
whence he will come to judge the living and the dead;
and in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Church,
the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the flesh,
[life everlasting].
The Later Creed
What we now know as the Apostles’ Creed is an enlargement of the Old Roman Creed. The first known occurrence of the Apostles’ Creed, in a form that is nearly equivalent to its final form, is in the Latin tract De singulis libris canonicis scarapsus by the monk Priminius (sometimes spelled “Pirminius”) from the early eighth century. The process by which the Old Roman Creed became the Apostles’ Creed cannot be exhaustively known, though Kelly notes that creeds that are “practically identical” to the Apostles’ Creed began to appear in South Gaul in the fifth century (Kelly, Creeds, 413). Over the next few centuries, the Apostles’ Creed in its final form gained acceptance throughout France and Germany. It was officially recognized by Charlemagne throughout the Frankish Empire in the early ninth century, and was eventually incorporated into the liturgy of the Church of Rome.
The creed as it exists today consists of three main articles, like the Old Roman Creed divided according to a Trinitarian arrangement. The text is as follows (Kelly, Creeds, 369):
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 from the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, descended into hell,
on the third day rose again from the dead,
ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty,
thence He will come to judge the living and the dead;
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the flesh,
and eternal life.
Amen.
Disputed Phrases
Grudem argues that the phrase “He descended into hell” is a late addition to the creed. This phrase is commonly understood as a reference to the “harrowing of hell,” which is based on one interpretation of 1 Pet 3:19. The phrase is first mentioned by Rufinus in the late fourth century, and does not appear in any other versions of the creed until AD 650. Rufinus himself notes that the clause “is not added in the Creed of the Roman Church” (Symb. 18), though he includes it in the version of the creed that was accepted by his own church of Aquileia (see Symb. 3). Moreover, Rufinus makes clear that he did not believe Christ literally descended into hell, but rather that the phrase merely meant He was buried. The Greek form of the creed has ᾅδης (hades), which can mean merely “the grave” rather than a place of punishment. Thus a more accurate version would be, “He descended into the grave” or “He descended to the dead” (Grudem, “He Did Not Descend,” 102). This understanding of the phrase is reflected, for example, in Question 50 of the Westminster Larger Catechism.
Instead of “holy catholic church,” some Protestant churches, particularly in the Lutheran tradition, recite “holy Christian church” to avoid misinterpreting the phrase as a reference to the Catholic Church. The creed seems to use “catholic” in the sense of “universal” or “global” (the Latin uses the adjective catholicam); this interpretation fits with the historic nature of the creed, which predates in its tradition the split of the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
Tradition, the “Rule of Faith,” and Core Christian Beliefs
The Apostles’ Creed seems to represent some form of what the early church called the “rule of faith.” The early Christians were guided by the “rule of faith,” the Holy Spirit working in community and individuals, and the authoritative Scriptures. Before the “rule of faith” was called such, there were general references to the teachings and traditions of the apostles. It is these core teachings that seem to make up the Apostles’ Creed.
Signs of these “core teachings” are seen as early as the New Testament book of Hebrews, which speaks of a need for Christians to grasp and embrace the basic concepts of faith so that they can move into deeper parts of their Christian faith, while at the same time realizing how essential it is that they never depart from a core belief in the real and living Christ (Hebrews 5:11–6:12). The Apostles’ Creed represents a set of uncompromisable core beliefs for Christians. As such, the core tradition of it is also found in the Nicene Creed. The Apostles’ Creed, like all creeds, functions like a filter for orthodoxy; it indicates what is and what is not “Christian.” It is a public profession of belief in historic Christianity.
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