The Apostles' Creed

It never mentions its own name: 'quick and the dead,' the descent into hell, the communion of saints, phrases so worn into English devotion that most who say them weekly could not date a single clause. Yet every line answers a controversy someone was prepared to die over: 'born of the Virgin Mary' against those who denied Christ came in the flesh at all, 'the resurrection of the body' against those who found a body beneath a Christian's dignity. It is the shortest and oldest of the church's three ecumenical creeds, built for a candidate to speak aloud at the font rather than for a council to argue over. Read it as a rope let down through eighteen centuries, still gripped at both ends.