Perhaps you have come across this social media post, or something like it:
A former student of mine posted it on Facebook recently with a “WOW” underneath. I agree with the “WOW,” but that’s because I think the quote is so bad—and points to a significant danger.
In the comments that followed, a pastor in a mainline Lutheran church cheerfully boasted that in her church’s liturgy “I put in a Land Acknowledgement [of aboriginal claims] and took out the creed.”
WOW, indeed.
Here’s a quick list of observations and concerns. But I want to state a basic affirmation up front.
I’m sympathetic to Christians who don’t understand how churches apparently can be (self-)satisfied with weekly worship that includes recitation of doctrine without complementary reminders of the needs of the world and particularly God’s demand for justice. These Christians believe, and rightly, that doctrine without ethics is sterile, just as the Epistle of James declares that “faith without works is dead.”
The Bible teaches theology to foster praise and praxis. Think of the structure of most of Paul’s letters: indicative, then imperative. “Since God is X and has done Y, then you should Z.” Doctrine is about what has been, what is now, what is the point, and what ought to be. Taught properly, theology inevitably promotes doxology, koinōnia, and mission.
Faithful Christians are right, therefore, to bemoan the presence of creed without community and compassion.
Let’s see, however, what we can learn from this juxtaposition of the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed.
1. This criticism of the Nicene Creed can sound something like the following: “This doctrinal statement is comprised solely of doctrinal statements. Outrageous!” It’s a category mistake, accusing the Creed of failing to do what a creed isn’t meant to do.
The Nicene Creed is a creed—a summary of certain beliefs (from the Latin credo = “I believe”) in order to make clear certain important (and, usually, contested) teachings for the Church. No creed is meant to offer a comprehensive list of all a Christian is to be and do.
None of the great creeds are meant even to offer a comprehensive list of all a Christian is supposed to believe! The Nicene Creed says nothing, for instance, about the nature of revelation in Scripture, nor about the role of Jesus’ teaching and example in the life of faith—just to pick two of many basics of Christian affirmation.
Creeds are always composed in particular circumstances in order to respond to a particular need. They are tools for certain jobs. We do well to learn what they are good for and use them appropriately, rather than throw away a hammer because it cannot drive a screw. Use something else for something else.
2. No Christian church says, “Yep, just affirm the doctrinal statement and you’re good. We have no other expectations from you regarding, say, ethics, or worship, or piety, or fellowship. Just say you believe these statements and you’re in fine standing.”
Yes, some churches unhelpfully overstress correctness of doctrine and downplay other elements of Christian life. But no church I can think of has ever reduced Christian identity, life, and witness to getting sacred ideas right.
3. In particular, none of the church leaders who hammered out the Nicean Creed (325) and the later Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381)—which we call “the Nicene Creed” for short—ever said anything like “There, now. We have summarized everything a Christian needs to believe. And Christianity is all about correct doctrine. So that’s that.”
Again, the Nicene Creed arises out of a particular situation in the early church and was meant to resolve certain pressing challenges. What it was never meant to do, even in the fourth century, is to summarize all of even the most basic doctrines of the Christian religion, let alone every fundamental element of Christian life.
4. Turning now to the Sermon on the Mount, let’s note that the Sermon itself contains doctrine. You can’t get past even chapter 5 (the first of the Sermon’s three chapters in Matthew) without encountering Jesus making statements about the nature of the Christian life, the nature of the kingdom of heaven, the nature of Scripture, the nature of holiness, and the nature of Providence.
Everything Jesus says to do in the Sermon on the Mount is rooted in what Jesus says is the truth about God and the world—which is, not to put too fine a point on it, doctrine: teachings to be believed.
5. The Sermon on the Mount is not all that Jesus taught. It is not all God wants the Church to know, believe, and practice. That’s why the entire corpus of written revelation from God isn’t just . . . the Sermon on the Mount.
That Sermon isn’t even a summary of Jesus’ own earthly teachings. It isn’t a summary of Jesus’ teachings even in the Gospel that includes it.
The Sermon on the Mount does not occupy a position of literary importance in GMatthew: not the beginning, the centre, or the end. It is not repeated by any of the other Gospels, GLuke’s Sermon on the Plain being significantly different.
It is never referred to by any other writer in the New Testament. It is never used in liturgy by any Christian community, even as elements of it are: especially the Beatitudes and, of course, the Lord’s Prayer.
Beware, then, the currently popular lifting up of these few chapters of one gospel among all the books of the Bible as some sort of touchstone for everything else the Bible teaches and everything Christianity is about. The Sermon on the Mount is wonderful, but the centre of Jesus’ teaching, let alone of the whole Scripture, it just isn’t.
What, then, does Jesus want us to believe and do? A lot. That’s why the Bible is big.
6. Why is doctrine vital? Why did the early church spend so much energy formulating baptismal statements (like the Apostles’ Creed) and doctrinal symbols (such as the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition of 451)—and then enforcing them? Why have Christian churches endorsed, taught, and incorporated into their very liturgy such statements of doctrine?
We can all be impatient at times: “Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care! Mumbling an old creed seems dumb to me, and I can’t be bothered finding out why my spiritual ancestors took it so seriously. Silly old-timers! So out it goes! I’m more into justice issues anyhow, as I’m sure Jesus was.” But a combination of ignorance and arrogance surely isn’t what’s needed here—what the Bible warns against as “zeal without knowledge” (Romans 10:2).
Jesus himself was manifestly “into” doctrine, spending a lot of his brief teaching ministry teaching about what God is like, what human beings are and need, who he was (and is), and in what the good life consists.
Jesus was also “into” ethics, of course, since the Christian life is, of all things, a way of life. But the way we choose to live and the actions we choose to engage in depend on what we think is real and important. And stating carefully what is fundamentally real and what is most important is the very essence of theology, whose churchly expression is doctrine.
7. If you dispense with the Nicene Creed and the doctrine it encapsulates, you don’t have more authentic Christianity. You have something other than Christianity.
No more triune God. No more Jesus Christ as divine incarnation. No more cross, resurrection, and ascension as the foundation of the reconciliation of humans with God. No more fellowship of the Spirit. No more hope of resurrection, judgment, and the world to come.
What you have instead is—well, whatever you want. You can keep the Trinity, if you like—at least for a while, until explaining it becomes tiresome and, frankly, just weird. In fact, come to think of it, since Jesus functions for us as Inspiring Example in our quest for justice, and the Holy Spirit can be just, you know, “Spirit” blessing us in the ways we approve of, we really don’t need trinitarian doctrine anymore.
Or you can keep the Cross, if you like—but as a symbol of self-sacrifice in the cause of justice, or a symbol of God’s love for us no matter who we are and what we do, or a symbol of martyrdom that valorizes our brave suffering for righteousness. What it isn’t any longer is the event of God making atonement for the sins of God’s creatures through his own suffering and death in Jesus. As liberal theologian Delores Williams immortally put it, “I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff."
Christianity now becomes not a tradition to be gratefully received from the millions of our forebears across space and time who have recited the Nicene Creed as one among several signs of ecclesial solidarity. It is for you instead a mere storehouse of various religious artifacts and commodities in which you can shop for what you will use or discard as you see fit.
The danger is basic. If you discard the Church’s core doctrinal affirmations to just “follow Jesus,” then both “following” and “Jesus” become something else. Historically, this path leads to one or another customized combination of mysticism and moralism.
That is the historical trajectory of the liberal tradition in Christianity. And that’s the path that beckons today in front of so-called progressive evangelicals, with one traditional Christian distinctive after another giving way.
In our time, the initial controversies usually have arisen within sexual ethics. (Our culture is, as both Michel Foucault and C. S. Lewis observed with dismay, mad about sex.) But wait a while, and you’ll soon observe defenders of same-sex marriage jettisoning substitutionary atonement, endorsing universalism, adopting religious pluralism, and reducing religion to spirituality and good deeds.
I’m not saying there is an inexorable, slippery-slope logic at work. Some people might well pick a spot on this path and park there indefinitely. As a church historian, however, I report what I see over the last two centuries: a distinctive pattern repeated over and over. And few churches seem to be able to remain in one of these intermediate positions over subsequent generations. Eventually, it all gives way.
Consider F. D. E. Schleiermacher as a paradigm case. I pick him not only as the first great figure in this tradition (early nineteenth century) but also as one of the most evidently pious and relatively traditional.
The doctrine of the Trinity is an embarrassing contradiction, says Schleiermacher. The Bible is now to be regarded as just early Christian religious writing. (Schleiermacher thought that the Old Testament could be discarded or, at best, be appended to the New Testament as mere “Jewish background.”) Jesus is the first Christian, the great exemplar for us all to emulate. The dynamic of the Christian religion thus becomes, yes, a do-it-yourself blend of mysticism and moralism.
Let me be being candid about my fundamental worry—and I am indeed worried for these friends, as well as for many others. I worry that dropping the Creed—and, by this symbolic act, dropping a commitment to maintain the traditional teaching of the Church in favour of whatever we happen to think today—leaves your church without the motivation, guidance, and hope at the core of the historic Christian faith.
If you don’t sense that—or if you do, but it doesn’t bother you—may I respectfully suggest that perhaps your basic motivation, guidance, and hope have already shifted. You already have a different set of assumptions, a different list of doctrines, as to what has been, what is now, what is the point, and what ought to be. No wonder, then, that you can dispense with the Nicene Creed.
So should aboriginal land claims matter to the Church? They ought to, as should any pressing matter of justice.
Is Christianity only about correct belief? No serious Christian has ever said so.
Can you practice the Sermon on the Mount without regard for traditional Christian doctrine? I don’t know why you would.
In sum, whatever Robin Meyers originally meant in the context of the book cited, this quotation on its own (and the way it was received by the Facebookers who approved of it) points to the transition some folks are making today away from mainstream Christianity toward their own preferred modes of spirituality.
What it doesn’t point to is an actual problem with the Christian tradition. That tradition has managed without strain to endorse both the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed for a couple of thousand years now.
Should contemporary North American churches do a much better job of living in the light of both the Sermon and the Creed? Yes, they should. But that’s a different issue, isn’t it?
The key move to make in reacting to disappointment with the contemporary evangelical (or Catholic or Orthodox church) is not to leave the right for the left. We must instead go deep.
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