Believe it or not: why creeds matter

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2003 by William C. Placher

As to the claim that creeds impose the will of the elite, Pelikan points out cases--most notably the opposition to Arianism in the century or so after the Council of Nicaea--in which, in John Henry Newman's words, "The Catholic people, in the length and breadth of Christendom, were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not." Sometimes the masses fight for their creeds against the elite. Moreover, as Christianity has spread around the world, it is often a new confession that expresses the faith of Third World peoples in their own distinctive languages in contrast to the languages and categories of their colonizers.

It is easy to be cynical about confessions when confessing carries no danger. The term "confessor," it is worth remembering, originally referred to those in the early church who had been arrested and tortured for their faith, though not (like martyrs) actually killed. We may now treat the confession of faith so casually because it comes so easily. We perhaps have become too comfortable in various ways to take confessions seriously enough.

Belief in resurrection, historians tell us, emerged in ancient Judaism only when disaster followed disaster and Jews could no longer feel confident that their memory and legacy would be preserved in the life of their own descendents in particular and the Jewish people in general. Then and now, those who lead rich and rewarding lives in this world may be able to reconcile themselves to agnosticism about life after death. Similarly, those who feel relatively satisfied with themselves may not feel the need of an objective atonement. Comforting metaphors suffice.

Those who are suffering starvation and oppression or know themselves to be sinners, on the other hand, want truth, not just metaphors. Do the injustices of this world constitute the last word on how things are? Do sinners really have hope of redemption? Is there some meaning to this apparently chaotic universe? Is Christian faith incompatible with the views of Hitler and his minions, and are the differences worth dying for? Creeds and confessions offer answers to such questions: Here, people say, is what we believe to be the truth about things that matter ultimately.

What might be the short-term future for confessions in American mainline Protestantism? Let me speculate just a bit. Most of the really nasty ecclesial debates in the U.S. these days--on the role of women, homosexuality, evolution and so on--center explicitly or implicitly on how we interpret the Bible. Could we be helped in settling such debates by confessional statements? My own guess is that simply addressing the controversial issues of the moment will not be of much use. We need to dig deeper. Perhaps even across denominational lines, those of us on the center left need to articulate how the Bible still functions for us as a religious authority, indeed as the word of God. Those on the center right need to explain the interpretive rules which seem to lead them to different conclusions on some issues (divorce, the role of women in the church) than on others (homosexuality, salvation for non-Christians). Whether or not such statements would ever have confessional status, Pelikan's collection of texts reminds us how helpful the dear statement of a position can be in the life of the church. Whether Christians find a compromise or force a choice, they are at least talking clearly about the real issues.