ABSTRACT
Until his retirement, Malcolm Ruel was a University Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University. His research was mostly conducted in West and East Africa and his extensive publications are largely concerned with political anthropology and the anthropology of religion. The peculiarity of the place given to belief in Christian history is a monumental matter, whose importance and relative uniqueness must be appreciated. To narrow somewhat the vastness of the topic, four periods have been selected from the history of the church in which to discuss the idea of belief and how it is involved in any definition, corporate or personal, of Christian identity. The baptismal creeds summarized the received teaching, but their local use in the widely scattered Christian communities, headed as each was by their bishop, was subject to variation and reformulation. The conciliar creeds did not replace the baptismal creeds, nor were they intended to do so.
