On the use of the Creed

 Steve Kneale has published a piece entitled Five reasons reciting creeds is unhelpful - a title which surely warrants a rebuttal!  For the record, my own church background is in 1689 Baptistry, but I now pastor a small church which takes the Nicene Creed as its basis of faith, and I am a strong advocate for the use of the Creed in public worship (and I like the Apostles' Creed as well, just not quite as much).  So, here's why I think each of Steve's reasons is wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.

1. Sola Scriptura.  For Steve, it seems, the use of creeds undermines the unique authority of Scripture in the church.  "We want people to have confidence in the Word of God" - yes, absolutely!  So, why not just always go to the source?  Why not just read the Bible instead of the Creed?  Well, firstly it's not an either/or.  Read both in your services!  Recite the Creed and recite the Psalms.  Yes, a thousand times yes, to more Bible.  But why then the Creed?  Because when Steve goes on to say that "when people state what they believe, I would prefer they pointed directly to the Bible and affirmed it, rather than a statement drawn up after it" this is exactly the argument an Arian would have made in the fourth century.  It is possible to mis-read the Bible - Jesus highlights the possibility - and in so doing miss or distort the life-giving message.  Biblicism will not help us here; the heretics themselves claim the Scriptures to be on their side.  The Creed functions as a distilled statement of the essential truth, and therefore as a guide to Scripture reading.  Putting it into our worship, reciting it together, helps to ensure that we are all on the same page on such essentials as the deity of Christ.  It is not vital that we recite it, but it is helpful.

2. The creeds require explanation.  No doubt.  I preached a series on the Nicene Creed not too long ago to provide some of that explanation for our crew.  But everything, including Holy Scripture, needs explaining.  Often the hymns we sing need explaining.  Explanation is no bad thing.  But also, the creeds do some explaining of their own.  The Nicene Creed explains what we mean when we talk about the deity of Christ.  It explains, in fact, what the Scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus as the Son of God.  In explaining the Creed, I've found myself simply preaching the gospel.  And that can't be so bad.

3. Use of the creeds in worship confuses the church about authority.  Steve asks 'is the creed authoritative?' - if it is, doesn't that undermine the authority of Scripture?  If it isn't, why are we using it in worship?  Again, there is a really unhelpful biblicism here.  The Bible is, and must be seen to be, the ultimate authority in all matters of doctrine; but it is not the only authority.  We don't come to the Bible as if nobody had ever read it before.  Yes, ultimately we believe and use the Creed because we are convinced it has behind it the authority of Scripture; but we also acknowledge that others have gone ahead of us, that we are part of the catholic church which spans the centuries, within which there are subordinate authorities like creeds.  They are not ultimate, but they are not lightly put aside if we want to be sure that we stand in some continuity of faith with our spiritual forebears.  In our teenage culture, which thinks it needs to reinvent everything all the time, it is good to recognise the (subordinate) authority of our fathers and mothers in faith.

4. Alien to outsiders.  Reciting creeds feels weird to visitors.  This is weak.  Almost everything we do in worship feels weird to outsiders.  So what?  As to encouraging people to chunter along to words they don't and can't mean - presumably Steve still has songs in church, and presumably they are full of lyrics a non-Christian can't really sing?

5. Creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition.  Steve finds the recitations of creeds to be Anglican, and he suspects that behind that lurks Catholicism.  In fact, the Nicene Creed is regularly recited in worship in Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches.  It is catholic, in the good old sense of basically and universally Christian - both as a statement of doctrine and as a building block of liturgy.  There is something peculiar about British non-conformity here, by the way.  I was once chatting with an American Presbyterian minister who asked whether British evangelicals would find it weird that his congregation crossed themselves during the Gloria Patri.  I had to say yes - they would find the manual action weird, and they would find the Gloria Patri weird!  The fear of 'catholicism' - perhaps caused by the proximity to Anglo-Catholicism in particular - has distorted the view of what is just 'normal church' for many British evangelicals.  If the creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition, the Baptist tradition is (at that point) alien to the universal belief and practice of the church.

So, to summarise my argument: biblicism is bad, weird is okay, Baptists should get with the programme.

Divine mandates and the present crisis

In the tragically unfinished Ethics manuscript entitled The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates, Dietrich Bonhoeffer begins to investigate what a well-ordered human society might look like.  The first thing he wants to be clear on is that in a well-ordered society we are always faced with the one concrete commandment of God "as it is revealed in Jesus Christ".  There can be no neutrality on this point; Christ Jesus rules in every sphere of life.  (Bonhoeffer pushes back here against the Lutheran understanding of the two kingdoms; indeed, he does not consider this to be authentically Lutheran teaching at all).  But the one commandment encounters us in particular circumstances, particular spheres.  Bonhoeffer talks about the four divine mandates of church, marriage and family, culture (or sometimes 'work'), and government.

In each of these four mandates we come up against the concrete commandment of God; each is ordered from above, from heaven, and is not merely an outgrowth or development of human history.  The four mandates are envisaged as co-existing: "None of these mandates exists self-sufficiently, nor can any one of them claim to replace all the others."  They are with-one-another, for-one-another, and over-against-one-another; that is to say, they are limited by one another even as they exist to support one another.  The obvious target here for Bonhoeffer is the encroaching Nazi totalitarianism, which wants to subordinate all spheres of life to the state.  In fact, each of the divine mandates finds itself limited in two key ways in a well-ordered society: from above, because it is constrained to serve God's commandment and not its own ends, and from all sides, because it cannot arbitrarily encroach on the territory of the other mandates.

This is Bonhoeffer's version of a theory which has been commonplace in Christian thinking about politics and society.  Whether it is the high mediæval assertion of the church's liberties against the crown (think Beckett), or the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine, or the Barmen Declaration railing against totalitarianism in the 1930s, the goal is the same: to understand, on the basis of God's creation and Christ's universal Lordship, what it means for human institutions to exercise legitimate authority within their particular spheres.

This is a peculiarly Christian approach.  Because God sits above every sphere, and because each of the mandates finds it authorisation in him and his providential arrangement, it is not possible for any to usurp the place of the others.  Family is not dependent on the state for its authorisation; the church is not dependent on the culture for its authorisation; etc. etc.  Each mandate operates with divine authorisation within its own sphere.  The mandates are oriented towards each other - they are not hermetically sealed against each other - but they cannot arbitrarily claim an authority to interfere in other spheres.  If the church is to interfere in the state, it must not be to usurp the state, but to establish the state in its independence within its own sphere.  If the state wishes to be involved in regulating family life, that can only be for the sake of the independence of family life from the state.

To my mind, this is what has been missing from a lot of Christian debate about the response to Covid from Her Majesty's Government.  Many of the responses I've seen have relied on a biblicist citing of Romans 13 to suggest that we must always submit to the Government's whims.  Most have jumped straight to the practical question 'when should we disobey?'  But the background questions which urgently need working through are: is the state currently operating within its legitimate sphere, or has it usurped the place of other mandates; and, where the state has impinged on other mandates, has it done so with the legitimate aim of strengthening those mandates in their independence?  These are the questions which are raised by the historic Christian tradition of political and social thought.  I'd like to see some more work done on them.  We ought not to take it for granted that the state has the authority which it claims for itself, nor should we short-circuit the theo-political thinking that needs to happen here by a quick appeal to a Pauline proof-text.

The church is uniquely well placed to offer constructive critique here.  This sense of a divine division of powers has largely faded in our society; we are ripe for totalitarianism, even if it does turn out to be democratic totalitarianism.  The church, though, is still able to see Christ on his throne above it all, limiting but also authorising the various human institutions in their particular spheres.  The church can and should speak out - not only when her own sphere is threatened, but also to speak up for the rights of family, and of culture, and, yes, even of the state where those rights are threatened.  Because we see each sphere as established by God, we cannot be content to see them dissolved into one another.

The present crisis is the time to think this through, to work out what we are called to say and do.  Crisis is always the time when institutions threaten to overflow their banks.  Legitimate crisis response easily becomes illegitimate accumulation of powers.  We should not take it for granted that when the crisis passes things will return to 'normal'; it is far more likely, I think, that the crisis reveals what has been really going on for years.