Who Needs a Creed? (part 1 of 12)

I became a Christian with the help of a small group of believers on my college dorm floor. As is common in such circles, we believed that “the Bible alone” was sufficient to know Christ’s revelation and live as he wanted us to. We didn’t recite the words “No Creed but the Bible” (itself a sort of creed), but we would have sympathized with it.

Christianity (I was taught) was a relationship, not a religion. “Religion” had about it the savor of something stiff, dried out, mummified. It was (we thought) the husk left over when the juice of a living relationship with God had evaporated. It was the cardboard container the food came in — a thing to be thrown away, avoided and despised. And creeds seemed to be a dose of “religion” in chemical purity: an attempt to put the living God back in the box.

The problem came as we tried to live out the Gospel in the real world. It’s all well and good to be “Spirit-led,” footloose and fancy-free, a leaf on the wind, when you are in college and you are singing chipper tunes about God loving you to the thrum of a guitar.

But as time goes on and your prayer group graduates and tries to become a local church and starts to attract a few strangers from the neighborhood who aren’t part of your cozy circle of friends, things get complicated.

Fairly quickly, somebody asks “What do you believe?” and you can no longer rely on a sort of network of unspoken knowledge that you and your friends are decent folk who wouldn’t believe or do anything at odds with the Gospel. You have to try to articulate what, precisely, you believe in a way that is intelligible to somebody who doesn’t know you.

And so we found ourselves, a group of perhaps 30 young adults, huddled in a room with a blackboard, trying to summarize what we, as Bible-believing charismatic Christians, believed, in a “Statement of Faith.”

It was, in its own way, a hilarious afternoon (at least in retrospect). The chalkboard was soon filled with different clauses and points of doctrine, connected in a baffling web of arrows that looked like a football diagram in a Goofy cartoon.

A week or so later, the pastor just pounded out something on his own typewriter about how we believed in the Bible, God the Father, Jesus his son, the Holy Spirit, and being a community of Spirit-filled servants.

I thought to myself dimly that it reminded me of something I’d heard somewhere, but my lack of familiarity with historical Christianity had prevented me from having much familiarity with the Twelve Apostles or Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. When I did discover them a few years later, it began to dawn on me that we could have saved a lot of time just copying them instead of reinventing the wheel with corners on it.

You don’t need a creed for a collection of tales about gods in Asgaard, Olympus or the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The myths of Greece or Rome or the folk tales of Germany and the Great Plains required only poets and bards, not creeds.

It was only when heaven began to upset the apple cart by involving itself in the mundane day-to-day events of a very real group of humans called “Israel,” whom the Lord God had brought from Egypt, that something like a creedal formula began to emerge. Suddenly, something had happened, not Once Upon a Time but to a specific group of people in history.

Moreover, this people was constantly being pressured by its neighbors and by its own sinful tendencies to forget what had happened. And so their history became one long and careful act of remembering, not imagining — designed to make sure that their past was not lost.

When the Church began, that need to remember and summarize what had happened continued. And since what had happened was so strange — and so fraught with the possibility of being misunderstood in a thousand ways — the Church also was immediately committed to creating summaries of the faith that, while initially brief (“Jesus is Lord”), expanded in length over time to make sure that the broad contours of the basic story and its meaning were not lost.

That’s because the central command around which the entire Church was built was: “Do this in memory of me.” No creed, no memory. No memory, no Eucharist.

Over the next dozen installments of this column, therefore, we are going to take an extended look at the creed and see how this long act of remembering still speaks to us today in the heart of our Eucharistic Church.

It is even sadder is people don’t even understand who the church is. It’s the body of believers!

This cannot be true, if you believe the Bible! The Church of the Bible is one, and teaches the Truth, guided by the Holy Spirit.

“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” John 16:12-13

“But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” 1Tim 3:15

Here Christ says, and Paul reaffirms, that the Church will always teach the TRUTH. So which “body of believers” teaches the truth?

How would you make sense of the following?

"If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. "I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Mat 81:15-18

Where do you take your concerns? Makes no sense whatsoever without the visible Church Christ established with teaching authority, and the power to loose and bind. Christians can’t even agree on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

The Church of the apostles was definitely one: "There is one body and one spirit," Paul wrote, "just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all" (Eph. 4:4-5). Paul linked this unity to the Church's common Eucharistic bread: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17). Jesus had promised at the outset that "there would be one flock, one shepherd" (John 10:16).

Think about it. Would Christ establish his Church – to teach the way, the truth – and allow thousands of interpretation as to what is the truth? If the Church doesn’t teach the Truth, Christ is a liar. If He would allow multiple versions of Truth, he’d be an idiot. I don’t believe He is either.

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