Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the third of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here and the second post is accessible here. The fourth post will be published in due course.If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.
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Commentary on Pragraph 9 of the Basis
When did you last say either the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds in worship? And if you said it, how many in the congregation had their fingers crossed whilst saying it? Or, did you notice a distinctly muted collective mumble when it came to the statements 'born of the Virgin Mary' and 'on the third day he rose again'. These elements of the Creed have troubled Christians who have been enculturated into modernity. They constitute the so-called ‘supernatural’ elements of Christianity which modern people have been taught to distrust. To this objection, it could be asked, ‘Why stop at these elements?’ If modernity is our benchmark, why even believe in God as Creator?
On the
other hand, other Christians are troubled by the fact that we continue to use
creeds which, quite apart from any specific problematic details, come from an
overall cultural and intellectual framework so (apparently) alien to our own. As
such, their relevance is deemed doubtful. This can only be pushed so far as an
intellectually serious objection because Jesus’ own context and that of the New
Testament is even older and arguably even more alien than that of the Creeds.
Then there
are others who are troubled not merely by any particular claims or by the
cultural difference between us and the authors of the Creeds, but by the very
act itself of saying a Creed. For them, to affirm Creeds defined as
“authoritative statements of the Catholic faith…[which] declare and guard the
right understanding of that faith” is a challenge to the freedom of individuals
to make up their own minds about what to believe.
Whilst the
themes of Paragraph 9 will increase the anxieties of all three of these groups
of objectors, they probably most clearly prompt an engagement with the third
set of concerns. But the other two concerns also invite some brief comment. In
many ways both of them question the capacity for the wisdom of the past to
engage us or make any claim upon us. And here, I suspect, we confront a divide
in the church that is less between Christendom and post-Christendom, and more
between baby boomers and certain Christian millennials. The posture of baby
boomers towards the past is probably best captured in Marcus Borg’s description
of the Enlightenment as “the great watershed event in Western cultural history
that created the modern world, separating it from all that went before” and
which led to a “collision between the Enlightenment and Christianity”.[i]
Of course
there was a clash between the Enlightenment and Christianity. But millennials might
well regard the Enlightenment’s supersessionist posture (‘separating it from
all that went before’) towards the past as somewhat quaint. (Some of them would
also have studied enough philosophy and history to know that modernity existed
well before the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment was one specific political
manifestation of the intellectual currents of modernity. But that is another story!)
Few millennials – Christian or not – buy modernity’s triumphant rhetoric about
itself. Many of the millennials in the Uniting Church have much to teach the
rest of us about how to resist modernity’s dubious legacies of colonialism, its
misplaced confidence in Western rationality, and the culturally-sapping forces
of its individualism. That Uniting Church millennials are critically open to pre-Enlightenment wisdom is not because they are
more ‘conservative’ – as baby boomers might assume. It is because they have
been nurtured in different and arguably more politically- and
ideologically-aware notions of truth than baby boomers tended to be.
To return
now to the third of the concerns identified above. A willingness (or not) to
acknowledge an “authoritative statement” which “guards a right understanding of
the faith” says something, at least in principle, about our understanding of
Christianity regardless of the content of the Creed. I stress, in principle. But the principle is
focused in this question: Do we think Christianity is something we can
parochially reinvent or is there something constant about it across time and
space? That the Basis declares that
saying these Creeds links us to the “unity of the Church throughout the ages”
suggests the latter. And to affirm that unity indicates a willingness, in some
sense, to be accountable to the whole church regardless of whether we ‘believe’
everything that every other Christian of the past has believed. After all, as already noted earlier in this
commentary, the Creeds bypass the details of
Jesus’ human life and manage to say what they say without mentioning
God’s love. But that is not a reason not to use them.
But what
‘right understandings of the faith’ are actually entailed in the Creeds?
Interestingly, the Basis is quite coy
about this – something which reinforces the point made above. Nevertheless, in
describing their use as “acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity” there is an
implicit reminder that the Trinitarian understanding of God is a primary
concern of both Creeds, particularly the Nicene. Space does not allow a full discussion of
this here. Suffice to say the following. In relation to their Trinitarian
orientation, I wish that rather than saying “framed in the language of their
day”, this paragraph had actually said ‘responding to the issues of their day’.
Had it done so, we would have been continually reminded that the task of
interpreting the Creeds requires an understanding the questions to which they
were answers.
One of the
background questions to early Trinitarian disputes was whether the claim that
Jesus was God incarnate implied that God had somehow become less God by
entering the messiness of this world. Some felt that God’s ‘godness’ was being
dishonoured by affirming the incarnation. To say that God is Father, Son and
Spirit is, in a very short summary form, a way of insisting that Christians
don’t believe in just any ‘god’. Rather they believe in God whose very
‘godness’ is on full display and not at all compromised by entering the world
of flesh and time in the work of the Son and Spirit. If that’s not true, then
the game would be up for Christianity. That is perhaps the key thing we can
learn from a “careful study of these creeds” and which is worth ‘declaring and
guarding’.
[i] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and
Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
2006), 21.
