A Political Q and A

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 9 January 2014 9 Comments
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Question

I have always had trouble saying the Nicene Creed. It sticks in my throat. I know several others who have the same experience with it. When you were in Amarillo in June, you gave an explanation of it and how you relate to it. I believe others might find it helpful so would you mind repeating it?

 

Answer

Dear Mary,

I find it difficult to recall what I said back in June. I only know I enjoyed our time in Amarillo enormously. My thanks to all of you for that time. It was very special.

Your question, however, comes up often. I think it is because people think of the creeds as statements of belief required of a Christian. The creeds are certainly used that way in many Christian churches. Is that, however, a proper way to view them? I do not think so.

A look at history will help to put the creeds into perspective. St. Paul did not know anything about creeds. He responded in I Corinthians 15 to questions about the Christian faith by saying, “I have delivered to you as of first importance what I have received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephus, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. “Last of all,” Paul concludes, “he appeared to me.” This recitation of the major events in the Christ story looks to me like the beginning of a creed.

Having said that, however, a look at early church history reveals that no one related to these Pauline words as the beginning of doctrine or dogma. Indeed, much of it is open to a wide variety of interpretations. The idea that Jesus “died for my sins,” for example, has come to be read as a statement of substitutionary atonement, which is nonsense, both historically and psychologically. The phrase “to die for our sins” arises out of the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, which is something vastly different from the idea that God punished Jesus for our sins instead of punishing you and me. To hold to that concept would give us a rather monstrous, child-abusing God that I for one would not care to worship.

In the “Parable of the Judgment,” found in Matthew 25, the only criteria for entering the Kingdom of Heaven did not involve believing any creedal statement, but rather the ability to see the “Holy” in the faces of those viewed as the least of humanity, the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned and the sick.

The Nicene Creed, which is the one to which most people are referring when they talk about creeds, is a fourth century document hammered out in great conflict at a council meeting of the leaders of Christianity in 325 CE. Because the intellectual life of the fourth century Mediterranean world was dominated by the Greek language and culture, this creed reflects the dualistic thinking of Ancient Greece, contrasting the supernatural with the natural, the divine with the human and the body with the soul. Most dualistic thinking has been abandoned by the intellectual world of the 21st century. Yet those creeds live on and, if literalized, bend 21st century minds into fourth century pretzels! They were never meant to be strait jackets into which our minds had to be contained or girdles into which our flabby faith had to be forced. I see this creed primarily as a love song that our fourth century ancestors wrote to sing to their understanding of God. I have no problem in joining in the singing of this ancient love song, but it would not occur to me that saying these words in worship somehow committed me to a literalized belief system, based on a 4th century view of reality.

All creeds are human attempts to capture in human words the experience of the divine. The words we use to describe the divine will differ in every generation. There is no such thing as an unchanging universal language. No one can be bound by the words of a generation that no longer exists and that includes the words of our creeds. God is a living experience and talking about that experience will take different forms in every generation. None of those forms will ever be ultimate nor will any of them ever capture truth for all time. Words like infallible and inerrant have no place in the Christian vocabulary.

I hope this helps.

John Shelby Spong

 

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