Evading the Creed
The Various Attacks on the Faith of the Church & Why They Fail
by David Mills
Not only the various claims in the Christian Creed, but also the authority of the Creed is under attack, and at high levels. The direct assaults upon orthodox Christianity by would-be heresiarchs receive all the attention, but a greater threat to the faith has gone more or less unnoticed. This threat is the popular attempt to keep the Creed in a place of authority while draining its meaning and drastically reducing its effect on the life of the Church. It dissolves the hold of the Creed upon the minds and allegiance of the faithful by reinterpreting its plain and obvious and hitherto accepted meaning and by changing its place in the Church’s life. It does not discard the Creed but evades it.
I will take examples only from my own church, the Anglican Communion, but the phenomenon is one with which any member of a major church, with the temporary exception of Orthodoxy, will be familiar. By “Creed,” I mean not only the authoritative creeds established by church councils and the dependent doctrines that follow from the creeds and are usually included in the fundamentals or essentials of the faith, but also the creedal or dogmatic mind that knows doctrinal precision to be necessary to the faithful Christian life. In this sense, a fundamentalist who does not even know the Apostles’ Creed may be a creedal Christian, and an Anglican archbishop or a Roman cardinal deeply learned in the subtleties of theology may not be. By “the Creed” I mean the historic creeds themselves.
In the major churches of Western society, belief in the Creed is, speaking precisely, uncharacteristic. It does not characterize them, it is no longer a mark of their lives. This odd attitude to the Creed is not something found in the growing churches of Africa or in the churches that have heroically resisted Communist regimes. They understand that the power of the gospel to convert and sustain rests upon the truth of its doctrines. Christians faced with vigorous Islamic movements have complained that the writings of modernist Anglicans like the bishop of Durham are used by Muslim evangelists to devastating effect. They know what heresy does, and are not inclined to dilute the Creed of their salvation.
The Creed is evaded commonly or typically in four ways. The most popular and subtlest attempts to transcend the creeds, to go beyond and behind them to find their real meaning. The second puts the Church’s institutional interests over the truths of the Creed, by treating the historic creeds as temporary expressions of the community’s self-understanding. The third claims that we simply don’t know enough to have an authoritative creed or, alternatively, that the truth is ever beyond our grasp. And the fourth claims that the Creed is all right as far as it goes, but that it needs enriching or expanding to satisfy new needs or conform with new insights.
These methods complement one another and are frequently combined, and anyone who holds one is likely to hold them all. Someone who believes that we do not know enough to have an authoritative creed (the third method) will almost certainly want to reinterpret the Creed as it stands (the first method), while adding new and more congenial teachings (the fourth method), and while retaining some sort of continuity with his tradition by stressing his primary commitment to his Church (the second method).
The “Real Meaning” of the Creed
Perhaps the best example of the first method of evasion in Anglicanism is the influential theology of the Reverend Dr. John Macquarrie, until recently the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. His Principles of Christian Theology, written in the 1960s when he was a Presbyterian disciple of Heidegger and slightly revised after he became an Anglican, is the standard theological text in many if not most Episcopal seminaries.
Of the creeds themselves, he seems to have a high opinion. Rejecting them “cannot take place in Christian theology,” he writes at one point, and later that “they set forth the authentic faith.” He uses them as an authority against any attempt to remove Jesus entirely from history. But though he asserts their authority, he refuses to grant such authority to their historic meaning. Though “the modern theologian cannot turn his back on creedal symbols that have become elements in the community’s identity,” he could not
simply repeat these unaltered. This would be quite unintelligent deference to tradition. He is not to reject symbols that declare the Church’s common mind, but he must . . . penetrate behind the possibly quaint and even alien language of the dogma to the existential issues that agitated the Church at the time of the dogma’s formulation, and appropriate for our own time and in our own language the essential insight which the dogma sought to express. Every interpretation, in course of time, demands a new act of interpretation.
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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