Book Review: Credo by Ray Pritchard
Apr 12th, 2006 by cadmus
For many people today, a belief system is drawn from a smorgasbord of religious, political, and cultural systems. What each person believes is as unique as the individual. For many of those people, beliefs change over time as they are affected by experience and events. But how many people are willing to die for their beliefs? For example, if you believe in the freedom of speech, would you be willing to sacrifice your life because of it? Would you do it for another person’s right to speak freely? For his book, “Credo”, Ray Pritchard uses the subtitle “Believing in Something to Die for.”
In this book, Dr Pritchard dives into the Apostle’s Creed line by line and explains how it is still relevant in the 21st Century. In each chapter, he covers why each line is in the Creed and its importance to the Creed and to every Christian. Several times in the book Dr Pritchard reminds us that Christians believe in more than what’s in the Creed, but not in anything less. To call yourself a Christian, you will say “I believe” at the beginning of each line of the Apostle’s Creed.
With that being said, the line “He descended into Hell” causes the most difficulty for many people. It does for me, but we don’t recite it at my church either. Dr Pritchard addresses this matter in the chapter “The Strangest Part of the Creed”. He provides a compelling argument for keeping this line as it is in the Creed and why it was written in the first place.
After providing plenty to think about in each chapter, Dr Pritchard has questions to help us probe a little deeper. This would be very useful for personal study or in a small group. Coming in over 200 pages, this book has lots of material to digest and I found it all very inspirational and encouraging. It’s all very enjoyable but my favorite chapters were 15 “God has a big family” and 16 “All one body we”.
No matter what your opinion of the Apostle’s Creed, I highly recommend this book because it is a nice reminder of what is the basis of our Christian faith.
