By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).
“… and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.” (CCC 1042-1065)
Anyone who knows me well knows that I can be a little long-winded at times. And to those people, I will say: I’m working on this, I promise. Now I will also say, because of my oldest child, I am convinced this is genetic. My maternal grandfather was also a storyteller. We love the details of stories. I think we don’t want to settle for saying, “You’d have to have been there.” But we do have to eventually get to the point. And so, for our last installment of “Connecting Creed and Life,” I’ll get right to it: Our Catholic faith demands belief in something scientifically impossible.
Now you might be thinking: demands seems a little strong. But St. Paul makes it clear: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then … your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.” Let me put it another way: If the resurrection isn’t true, we have been wasting our time. All of our hope rests in Christ and his promise, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven … as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me … he who eats this bread will live for ever” (John. 6:48, 57-58). The last line of the Creed expresses part of the most important truth of our faith: God became man in the person of Jesus, died for our sakes, and rose from the dead into glory, so that we might be able to do the same. The resurrection of the dead is both a tremendous mystery and an extraordinary promise. This isn’t what Jairus’ daughter or Lazarus experienced (cf. Mark 5:21-43; John 11:38-44). We might call their experience a “resuscitation,” because they eventually underwent death once again. What we look forward to is what Mary, the mother of Jesus, received. The feast of the Assumption, every Aug. 15, is a celebration of the fulfillment of God’s promise of the resurrection.
Belief in a general resurrection began as part of the Old Testament biblical writings during the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon. “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). The Church has continually affirmed this till today, such as when Pope Paul VI wrote, “We believe that the souls of all who die in Christ’s grace … are the People of God, beyond death. On the day of resurrection, death will be definitively conquered, when these souls will be reunited with their bodies” (Credo of the People of God, §28). After the universal judgment, the righteous will be glorified in body and soul, and reign with Christ forever (cf. CCC 1042).
What should we make of “the life of the world to come”? The Catechism tells us, “the form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away” (CCC 1048). We might be tempted to imagine the end times as the Earth being destroyed or fading away into irrelevance, but a more helpful, and dare I say, probable, vision awaits us. The original Latin word for “form” in the Catechism is, “figura,” which refers to a thing’s shape or image. Just as Christ’s glorified body was, at first, unrecognizable to those who saw him, like Mary Magdalene, who mistook him for the gardener (cf. John 20:15), his actions revealed his identity. So too will it be for creation itself: unrecognizable to our initial imaginations, but unmistakable in our experience of its goodness.
The final word of our creed, “Amen,” is both a judgment and a declaration of what we say, meaning both “I believe” and “it is firm.” This is why Jesus gives the parable of the pearl of great price, where a jeweler sells his entire life’s work and buys the field where this great treasure is buried. It’s the story of conversion, the reason we turn our lives upside down to follow Jesus, trusting that where he leads is the place of our greatest fulfillment. To say “amen” is to say, “I stake my life on it.”