For a hundred thousand years, from the moment when mankind became aware of itself, it has always been striving for Heaven, always seeking God. As the Bible tells us, God created man, and man seeks Him—but in fact He is not far from each of us. This is what is said in the 17th chapter of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. The history of the human spirit and culture is the history of the search for God. And only in certain segments of history did the black flame of spirituality flare up — an attempt to abandon the desire for Eternity. Such were the attempts at materialism in ancient India, ancient China, ancient Greece, and in our own century. But these are anomalies of spiritual development. Normal spiritual development has always taken place under the sign of faith, under the sign of what we call religion.

The word "religion" comes from the Latin religare, which means to bind. We are separate people, and there is a mystery that binds us to each other, connects us to the Highest, connects us to the goal of existence, and gives each individual an enduring meaning. We are no longer grains of sand, we are no longer garbage and autumn leaves that fall to the ground. Each of us is infinitely precious, like a pearl extracted from the waves. Every soul is a pearl. It all depends on how it is processed. And processing is spiritual life, spiritual effort.

This is the first point of the Creed. Further, we will move on to the main themes of the Symbol. Of course, I cannot cover this inexhaustible problem in its entirety. I will try to answer some questions later. And now I thank you all. I was very glad that you have gathered here to hear the ancient and eternally young word of the Church – that Nicene-Constantinople Creed, on which Christianity has stood for centuries and will stand unchangingly, all the time discovering new and new depths in it, all the time comprehending it, for here is the path that has no end, the path to infinity. This is an open model, a model of flight and travel to light.

Thank you.

SECOND CONVERSATION

God revealed Himself to man as the living God, as God speaking to him. The knowledge of God is not a one-sided process, like the knowledge of nature; This is a meeting. That is why we use the word Revelation here, but not revelation. A discovery in the sphere of nature is always something one-sided: man cognizes nature. When a person comes to know God, they meet. This is a meeting of two personalities. This is a dialogue.

The Word Father was bequeathed to us by Jesus Christ Himself. He put into this word both emotional warmth (the Father as caring, as loving) and the mysterious meaning associated with His person. He is our Father and He is His Father, but in very different ways. We will come to this later when we speak of the person of Christ.

We also call Him the Almighty. The Almighty is the one who constantly maintains existence. Being does not belong to us, we receive it and can lose it. In Psalm 103 it is said: when God deprives the world of His Spirit, everything turns to dust, "returns to its finger." This means that the mysterious name of God – the Eternal One, which probably sounded like Yahweh, means: "He Who has Being", "Who is". And when the prophet Moses asked Him: "Who are You?", He answered him: "I am the One Who exists." This is the definition of God.

He is the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth. Not an outpouring, not an emanation, not the consubstantiality of man and God, or nature and God, but something completely different. There is a gulf between the absolute Creator and creation—us and everything else that is created—because we are creature, creation. And this is one of the features of the Christian vision of existence. "Let there be light," says God. Let it be, He creates out of nothing. And this does not mean that nothing is any essence; mere existence did not exist, and He gave it a beginning.

Let us turn to the second thesis of the Symbol of Faith, which reads as follows: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In order to understand these words, it is necessary to turn to the Bible, to the Holy Scriptures, because without it we will not understand any of these words. For Jesus is the earthly name of God revealed in man, Christ is a concept that means "king", "anointed". Why "king" and what the Son of God means – we will talk about this later.

Now, the God of the Scriptures, the God of the Bible, is the God that speaks to man. And His Revelation, what He puts into the human heart, was written down by the wise men and prophets of ancient Israel, and already in the new era, by the apostles who compiled the Gospel and other books of the New Testament. It should not be thought that the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture lies in the fact that its authors wrote as if in a trance, as if they were dictated. Already the Fathers of the Church show us that such an opinion – and it existed – is false. For each of the biblical authors writes in his own style, he has his own language, his own literary devices, his own character. And even if we take the four Evangelists (the Gospel is the most accessible, many of you have read it), we can immediately note a profound difference between the sparse, laconic, slightly vernacular language of the Gospel of Mark and the language of the Gospel of John, with its long periods, its abundance of dialogues, with its completely different structure. Therefore, we can speak of the inspiration of the Bible as a kind of Divine-human mystery, as the intersection of two worlds: the soul of man – the son of his time, a man who is permeated with the ideas of his era, with the peculiarities of his language and country – and the flow of the Spirit that flows through him.

Figuratively, this can be expressed as follows: just as the sun, passing through a crystal, through a colored window of a stained-glass window, changes its color and light, so the Revelation, passing through the soul of a prophet or an apostle, is transmitted in different ways. And so it is necessary to remember that although we sometimes say that the Bible has one author – and that is God, but at the same time it has many authors – they are people, and people are completely different. The question of how to separate in the Bible what is central and essential from the transitory, temporary, and particular is precisely the subject of one of the disciplines of vast biblical scholarship. But every person who opens the Holy Scriptures not only out of curiosity, but in order to hear the voice addressed to him, will hear this voice through the centuries, through the peculiarities of language, style and concrete thinking.

The Bible is divided into two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. What connects them? One word, one concept, one reality, one power. We define it as Christ.