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I love Christian doctrine. Perhaps that's because of the way I was brought up.

No, it wasn't that my church taught me to love doctrine. In fact, it taught me to hate it by emphasizing all the things that our group had right that everyone else had wrong. In my youth, doctrine was not about being illuminated by the truth, it was about memorizing arguments that would prove other Christians wrong.

But when I finally broke out of that sectarian "remnant" mindset, I discovered that there was a classical Christian tradition that was not bankrupt (as I had been taught). There was indeed a rich foundation, built up out of biblical truth. I fell in love with what I thought I had despised.

There were several doors into my new experience: C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was one, as was John R. W. Stott's Basic Christianity. Much less celebrated, but equally important to me, was J. I. Packer's I Want to Be a Christian (later renamed Growing in Christ).

At some point—I can't remember quite when—I realized that one of the best ways to know what is central to Christian faith—what is "Mere" or "Basic"—is to meditate on the Apostles' Creed. That was an important element in Packer's I Want to Be a Christian, and I discovered that he was doing what others had done before him: Using the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments as the framework for Christian instruction. Loving music and being curious about church history, I soon realized that this was the same pattern that Martin Luther had followed. And not just in his catechism but in his hymn-writing. That Saxon Renaissance man made these three texts memorable by converting them into rhyming verse and setting them to music: Wir glauben all' in einen Gott, Vater unser in Himmelreich, and Dies sind die heil'gen zehn Gebot'.

This weekend I encountered the Apostles' Creed again, but this time it wasn't in a book or in a German hymn. It was on a DVD. Through his company Vision Video, our friend Ken Curtis (the founder of Christian History & Biography) has collaborated with others to bring us The Apostles' Creed: A look at its origin and its relevance to our lives today.

The subtitle ("a look at its origin") does not refer to the historical development of the Creed, of which we know relatively little. We have no evidence for the authorship of the apostles, captionhough pseudo-Augustine asserted it some time in the fifth or sixth century. We do however have late second-century quotations of creedal material by Irenaeus and Tertullian that show very strong parallels to what eventually crystallized in present form by the late seventh century. In between, we have much evidence that churches East and West were using similar material to prepare baptismal candidates.

The "origin" in the video's subtitle is instead the Creed's biblical foundations. The program features a number of well-known scholars commenting on the Creed's biblical roots: New Testament historian N. T. ("Tom") Wright, theologian Alistair McGrath, and historian Martin Marty, among them. Even former Christian History managing editor Mark Galli is among the talking heads. But what is striking about the experience is not simply the quality of the scholars, but the ecumenicity of it all. Besides the Anglicans and Lutheran already mentioned, there's Baptist Derek Tidball (London School of Theology), Greek Orthodox Kallistos Ware (Bishop of Diokleia, Oxford), Wesleyan Robert Mullholland (Asbury Seminary), and Seventh-day Adventist William Johnson (Andrews University).

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