The Flatlanders’ Creed
David Mills on Putting God in His Box
“I believe in God the Almighty Lord Creator, / I believe in Jesus the Savior of the people, / And I do believe in the power of the Spirit” runs (leaving out all the repetition) a creed now popular in some Anglican circles, indeed in some places used instead of the Nicene Creed in the Communion liturgy. Taken from South Africa, whose Anglican Church is the most westernized in Africa, it is sung to a very bouncy tune, which probably explains some of its appeal.
The tune, Louis Tarsitano wrote me, is “a critical detail here. The childish mind that hates the discipline of dogma is usually, at the same time, addicted to entertainment. Dogma is ‘boring,’ but finger painting your own ‘creed’ is ‘fun’.” The people I know who like this sort of thing intend to believe the full Nicene doctrine, if the choice is put that clearly, but simply do not know it well enough or love it deeply enough to say it when an entertaining alternative is on offer.
At any rate, the South African creed is certainly sung to a very singable tune and does get the singers to declare their belief in God. It suffers only in being heretical. For though it has a trinitarian form, it does not say anything about the nature of the Trinity itself and the relations of the three Persons. God is Father before he is Creator, and Jesus is Son before he is Savior, and the Holy Spirit is he who proceeds from the Father before he is the giver of power to men.
This creed is modalist, because it does not name the Persons but treats them as mere actors or functionaries. Modalism is the idea, the appealingly simple idea, that there is only one God in one person who acts and is experienced by us in three different ways. The Church (thinks the modalist) once named these three modes the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, those being the metaphors at hand for the types of experiences it wanted to describe, and it could rename them now if it wanted to or thought better and more relevant metaphors had been found.
As a test, think of into what acclamation or blessing this creed could be turned. It could be turned into the modalist acclamation “I believe in God: Creator, Savior, and Empowerer,” but it could not be turned into the orthodox acclamation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God. It has not within it even the minimum facts needed for even the simplest Trinitarian statement.
I suppose one could argue that it is not actually heretical—the question is whether the absence of necessary truths alone makes a statement heretical—but if it isn’t heretical it is still terribly thin. It really doesn’t say much at all, perhaps because it speaks only of what the Trinity does for us, which does greatly narrow what we can see of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. At any rate the faith it offers is not, beyond the use of the name Jesus for the second item in the list, a particularly Christian one.
Some Don’t Like Doctrines
Its possible heresy aside, one does wonder why anyone would choose this creed over the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds. Either of these, with their fuller articulation of the good news, would be the obvious choice of any normal Christian, who would want to say as much as he could about God. The thinness of the South African creed alone would be against it. It is as if a man, asked to speak for thirty minutes in praise of a great and good man whom he loved, chose instead to spend three minutes reading a few of the main points of the man’s resume.
One answer, I think, is simply that a lot of people don’t like doctrines. Liberals notoriously don’t like them, either in form or content, but a lot of very conservative people don’t like them either. And both groups dislike them because (among several reasons) they think we shouldn’t be speaking about such things.
Some, conservative as well as liberal, are happy to be Christians as long as Christianity doesn’t make any definite claim to be true and, more to the point, as long as it doesn’t present them with a long and elaborate list of claims, requiring the submission of their intellect and a disciplining of their moral life. Doctrine is too definite, too restrictive, too final.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more from the online archives
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on an Apostle’s Encounter with the Son’s Children by Anthony Esolen
24.4—July/August 2011
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