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Creeds

The Creed and/as The Pledge of Allegiance

09/05/2012
Church & Culture, Creeds, Empire
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“the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance. Recited weekly, in unison, the Creed is a declaration – the positive affirmation that is the correlate of the renunciations we made in baptism. In it we confess our allegiance to a “foreign” king, the triune God.

In that sense, if worship is like a renewal-of-vows ceremony, each week is also a citizenship-renewal ceremony. When we pledge that Jesus is Lord – not Caesar, not the emperor, nor the president or prime minister, not the chairman of the Federal Reserve – we are engaged in a political act (recalling that our baptism constitutes us as a new polis and that the Creed was a baptismal document).

This is the pledge of those whose “citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20) – which is not a citizenship in some otherworldly, ethereal kingdom but rather citizenship in an earthly kingdom that is coming.” – James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, pg. 191.

This, I think, is a fascinating rearticulation of what it means to recite the creed.

And yet, on some level, such a meaning has always been embedded in the practice – even if primarily on a sort of pre-cognitive level.

It is exactly this inherently political nature of Christian faith that makes me so concerned about the ways we have allowed the status quo of empire to co-opt Christian ethical, social, and even theological thinking.

We take for granted a particular framework handed to us by the kingdom of the world (in our case American Democratic Capitalism), and fail to critique that framework in light of the kingdom of heaven.

This pervades our thought and practice in all sorts of ways, not least of which is the complete lack of tension so many of us feel about “pledging allegiance” to Jesus as Lord when we recite the Creed, and then the very next day (or minute!)  pledging our allegiance to “the flag” and the Republic.

This tension should not be ignored, for it is not altogether clear that our allegiance to Jesus and our allegiance to the flag are able to go hand-in-hand so easily, and one must ask which we truly defer to when they come into conflict.

I would suggest that just as repeatedly saying the Creed is a morally formative practice, so is saying the pledge, which I imagine is exactly why Smith goes so far as to suggest in a footnote that in Christian schools and churches the Creed “should replace the American Pledge of Allegiance” rather than buttressing it.

Perriman’s Narrative-Historical Creed

07/10/2011
Creeds, Hermeneutics, Narrative Theology
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Theologian Andrew Perriman (author of The Coming of the Son of Man and The Future of the People of God) has been engaged in a project of grounding the Church’s theology in its historical narrative. Today, he offered a reworked creed that tried to capture the historical and storied nature of our faith.

I found it quite thought provoking, and since both creeds and narrative theology are a frequent topics here, I thought I’d post it and get some feedback/conversation going.

“We believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth, who sustains the unfolding of all life;
Who called a people in Abraham for his own possession and for his own purposes, to be a new beginning, a new creation, in the midst of the nations;
Who entered into judgment against his people Israel, subjecting them to the heavy hand of pagan empire.

We believe in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, Israel’s king;
Born under Augustus, executed under Tiberius;
Who died to save his rebellious people from destruction;
Who was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and was exalted to the right hand of the Father;
Who was given the name which was above every name, for the sake of the glory of Israel’s God in the ancient world;
Who was made judge and ruler of the nations;
And through whom his persecuted followers came to inherit the empire and then the world.

We believe in the Holy Spirit;
Who is the presence of the creator God in the midst of his people;
Who gives life and form and endurance to God’s new creation.

We believe in one people under Christ, redeemed from the corrosive power of sin, transformed by the events of the New Testament story, justified by its persistent trust in the creator, called to live practically and prophetically in the light of the final renewal of all things.

We believe in a final justice, the final defeat of Satan, evil and death. We believe in the new heavens and the new earth, the reconciliation of creator and creation, and the healing of the nations.”

You can find the full post, which includes some of the context of Perriman’s creed, here.

So, what did you think? Is this helpful, idiosyncratic, revolutionary, provocative, missing the point?

Creeds and Evangelicals

04/10/2011
Creeds, Evangelicalism
6 Comments

Yesterday at Talking Points Scot McKnight pointed out that Evangelicals have a tenuous relationship with the creeds of the Church.

On the one hand, they want to affirm orthodox conclusions about the nature of Christ, the Trinity, etc. But, on the other hand, they have no ecclesiological mechanism to declare the creeds to be in some sense authoritative.

So what we are left with is a situation in which most Evangelicals passionately affirm the creeds (at least the early creeds), and yet have very little ability to explain why.

And if a tenuous relationship with the creeds is a mark of Evangelicalism, I certainly fit the bill.

I see the importance of affirming the conclusions the early church made about Christology and Trinity, even if I might – in the words of N.T. Wright – mean something a bit different when I say the words of the creed than I once did.

At the same time I admit my apprehension about the potential for any creed or rule of faith to flatten out the beautiful narrative we find in the pages of Scripture.

Not so much because the creeds say something wrong, but because they do not say enough, and what they do say was written in response to the specific historical challenges the church was facing.

That they came to faithful conclusions I’m glad to affirm, but it seems foolish to suggest that answers from the debates of fifteen hundred years ago [or five hundred years ago in the Reformation] were all that must be said on any topic.

The problem, of course, is where does that leave us?

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-What is your experience with the Creeds in your own faith and Church Tradition?

-What do you think the place of the creeds should be in Evangelicalism?

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