I Miss the Creeds

One of the things that I loved most about the Catholic and Methodist churches I’ve attended is the recitation of the Creed. I like the Apostles’ Creed best, but the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds are also good. (They are just so long!)

I think the Creeds are important, and I am very sorry that my church stopped reciting one every Sunday. I felt a profound sense of loss when the Apostle’s Creed was dropped from our order of worship, and I still feel that loss every time I go to worship and we omit the corporate recitation of the Creed … because the Creed, corporately recited, binds us together in words the way the Eucharist binds us together in body.

You see, the Creeds distill the Faith down to its barest essentials. The Creeds remind us of the basic beliefs that we attested to when we made our profession of faith and sought believer’s baptism or were confirmed into the church.

Look at what the Apostle’s Creed says:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell. The third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; whence he shall come to judge the quick 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.

It’s the Gospel in a nutshell. It’s doctrine in its clearest, simplest form. And we need to emphasize doctrine. We need to remind ourselves, frequently, of exactly what we believe.

I have been re-reading, for the sixth or seventh time, Dorothy Sayers’s masterpiece of apologetics: Creed or Chaos? Ms. Sayers wrote at the height of World War II (and I shudder to think what she would write today) that Christianity’s move away from teaching dogma was dangerous, because, without dogma’s sharp dividing lines, we cannot distinguish between truth and heresy. Ms. Sayers defined heresy as “… the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.”

And for those who say that the Creeds are boring, or old-fashioned, all I can say is that  this attitude merely means you haven’t yet grasped the drama that the Creeds define. What is more amazing than the idea that the same God who made the heavens and the earth would deign to be born as an  infant in His created world, and would set out to right the greatest wrong ever perpetrated by mankind — the rejection of God — by dying and going to Hell in their place?! What more dramatic, incredible, outrageous plot has ever been hatched in the whole history of the world?!

The problem is that the Church as a whole seems to gloss over the story. Perhaps we’ve heard it so much that we’ve lost the wonder of it all. Perhaps it’s the watering-down of Christianity into a sort of milk-soppy pacifism that denies the very heart of Christ’s ministry on earth. Have you read what He did when He was down here? Sayers points out:

… I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of His Person can be so presented as to offend nobody. We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever His peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference; and He said … that what He brought with Him was fire and a sword.

Where are the fire and the sword these days? All too often, they are turned against fellow Christians. We soft-pedal our message to a pagan and sinful world, but we rush to be the first knife in the throat of a fellow Christian who dares to question our traditions, or who slips in his walk, or who doesn’t go to our church or adhere to our denomination’s specific teachings.

What would happen, I wonder, if we just held hands and started reciting the Creed together again — while really concentrating on the doctrines that it represents.

Tags: apologetics, Apostles' Creed, Athanasian Creed, Christianity, Creeds, doctrine, dogma, Dorothy Sayers, faith, favourite books, liturgy, Nicene Creed, Religion, worship