Creed

I’ve been in the Christian Churches / Churches of Christ almost my entire life. As a kid, this resulted in my sometimes not knowing how to answer questions from classmates.

“What church do you go to?”

“A Christian church.”

“Well, yeah, but Baptist, or Methodist, or…?”

“Umm, just a Christian church?”

After a few confused exchanges, I learned the magic words, “non-denominational,” that answered the immediate questions. Some time later, I learned more of our churches’ history. Properly speaking, we’re part of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. It grew out of the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801, when a preacher named Barton Stone and his church decided to leave their Presbyterian denomination and call themselves only Christians. They believed that the only way they could reach the world for Christ was for the church to be united, and the only way the church could be united was if it rejected human denominations and traditions and united around the New Testament. Stone later found common cause with Alexander Campbell and his father Thomas Campbell, Scottish Presbyterian immigrants who saw the church as having made mistakes and missteps over the centuries and wanted to wipe away centuries of human tradition and restore New Testament practice. The Restoration Movement was for a while one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the United States.

Restoration Movement preachers and writers have come up with a number of slogans and sayings in an attempt to communicate their ideals. “No creed but Christ.” “Where Scripture speaks, we speak. Where Scripture is silent, we’re silent.” “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.” ¹ In a recent sermon at West Towne, Ron, our pastor, poked fun at these sayings. “No creed but Christ” sure sounds like a creed. “Where Scripture is silent, we’re silent” isn’t in Scripture, so should we not have said it? “In non-essentials, liberty,” but the movement has split into three major sub-groups (the noninstrumental Churches of Christ, the independent Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ) over issues such as the use of instruments in worship services, the organization of mission societies, and whether communion should be open to non-members. And numerous further divisions have occurred within churches within these subgroups. Are all of these really essentials?

“No creed but Christ” is worth digging into a little further. The motivation is worthwhile: We want to center our faith around God and his Word, not human formulations of our beliefs about God and his Word. Creeds, by definition, are used to set boundaries, to say what is and is not acceptable belief and practice. We don’t want to exclude someone from God’s church based on a human statement of beliefs. And some of the creedal statements that Christians have come up with over the centuries are quite involved. Consider, for example, the Athanasian Creed, from circa 5th century; its text takes a whole printed page as it attempts to precisely describe the nature of the Trinity and of Jesus’ nature as fully God and fully man. I’m grateful for the theological efforts of Athanasius² and others, and I appreciate the importance of correctly understanding the Trinity and the nature of Jesus. However, these are hard matters, ultimately beyond our ability to fully comprehend; it feels wrong to say that someone who fails to affirm the Athanasian Creed’s full set of carefully worded doctrinal statements will, as it says, “without doubt… perish everlastingly.” We’re saved by the blood of Christ, not our creedal adherence.

And yet, there are a few problems with “No creed but Christ.”

First, as a practical matter, we do have creeds. Every local church community has a collection of beliefs which they’d say you need to adhere to in order to be a member. Sometimes these are explicit (a statement of faith on the church website), sometimes they’re implicit (someone finds themselves ostracized after making a wrong statement), and sometimes the explicit and the implicit don’t match. (Consider the example of someone who’s orthodox in their religious beliefs but finds themselves unwelcome due to a political stance.) Being explicit about our creeds is more honest and can help us avoid inadvertently turning secondary matters into tests of fellowship.

Second, if we say, “No creed but Christ,” we risk reducing Christ and the Bible to a creed. Donald Miller describes the results of this:

I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student at a local college… He asked to meet me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a Bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing… five or six ideas… He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, “If these ideas are so important, why aren’t they in the book?… It seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would have taken the time to make bullet points out of them… It is hard to believe that whatever it is He is talking about can be summed up this simply.” (Searching for God Knows What, p. 152)

Miller goes on to explain that these bullet points have been undeniably efficient and have helped reach “millions, perhaps,” but that they fail to explain the mystery of entering into a relationship of love with God the Father, Son, and Spirit.

C.S. Lewis compares theology and doctrine to a map. He talks about a friend, “an old, hard-bitten officer” who found theology dry and inadequate after a mystical experience of God in the desert. Lewis continues,

When he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. (Mere Christianity, p. 113-114)

But the map is still necessary, Lewis explains, both because “it is based on what hundreds of thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic” and because “the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America” (p. 114).

As Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.” Maps abstract and simplify and flatten; when I pull up a map of my surroundings on my phone, it replaces my neighborhood’s incredible variety and detail with some lines and some grey and green blotches. Yet, because we’re finite humans, we need these abstractions and simplifications and formulations to get a handle on the topic. Similarly, loving God with all our minds involves seeking to understand him, trying to formulate what it means to follow him, even though our efforts necessarily fall short of fully describing God. When done properly, our creeds and doctrines and theology become tools that we can use to help us in our walk with Christ, just as a good map helps us navigate the real world around us.

However, saying “No creed but Christ” may cause us to inadvertently forget this distinction – and, because we cannot navigate without a map, we may end up treating God’s Word as if it itself is just a map or a creed. The Bible contains creeds, such as 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, but it’s so much more – it’s the stories of the Lord’s faithfulness to his people, it’s prophets’ passion as they call their listeners to task for their unfaithfulness while repeatedly proclaiming the Lord’s faithfulness, it’s the Son of God’s parables as he challenges his listeners to enter the kingdom of God, it’s missionaries’ letters as they plead with tears for their readers to follow Christ. It’s “living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit, and joints from marrow,” (Heb. 4:12). It’s the Word of God and God’s revelation to us, pointing to the Word (Jn 1:1), God’s ultimate self-revelation (Heb. 1:2-3). Don’t reduce it to a map or a set of bullet points!

Third, by saying, “No creed but Christ,” we miss out on a rich vein of Christian tradition and a bond that we can share with our brothers and sisters throughout the millennia. Restorationism at its best seeks to hold accountable centuries of human-made interpretations and accruals and bring us back to the zeal and clarity of those who physically walked with Christ – but, at its worst, it acts like everything that happened in the meantime is superfluous or even corrupt. Tradition at its worst is a bundle of human impositions on and distractions and deviations from God’s way; but tradition at its best is centuries of effort to follow Christ by brothers and sisters who’ve gone before us, as the Holy Spirit lived in them and guided them and worked through them. Not only that, but tradition at its best becomes a way of affirming our unity with those past generations of brothers and sisters, as we look forward to worshipping with them around the throne of the Lamb. The Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed are, I believe, examples of tradition at its best. They clearly and succinctly express the core tenets of our faith, the greatness of the Father and the Son and the Spirit, and what they’ve done for us. In reciting them, we’re joined with Christians for centuries and around the world, reaffirming what they and we have found to be true. They even make good music.

So let’s use them! The Apostle’s Creed is one of the oldest known creeds and one of the best known, and many churches recite it as a congregation every Sunday. I’d love to see this practice spread. As you might expect for a 1600 year old statement, there are many translations. I like this one.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

Footnotes

1. Actually a centuries-old saying, but popular within our circles ↩

2. Athanasius of Alexandria, the trinitarian theologian whose name is attached to the creed, although it’s debated as to whether he wrote it. ↩