Summer Book Report #2

In The Creed, Emory theologian Luke Timothy Johnson explores the historical development and contemporary significance of the Nicene Creed (technically, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed).  It is one of the richer and more engaging texts on Christian faith and doctrine that I have read.  In my church growing up, we never recited a creed, and now I confess to wondering during mass how many of us truly believe every statement we are reciting.  Johnson takes this anxiety head-on:

We acknowledge that no one of us individually believes as much or as well as all of us do communally.  The church always believes more and better than any one of its members.  Does this mean that we act hypocritically when we say together "we believe?"  Not at all: it is rather that we stand together under these truths, in the hope that our individual "I believe" someday approaches the strength of the church's "we believe."

Johnson also eludes easy capture by either the conservative or liberal theological camps.  On the one hand, he resists any suggestion that the Christian faith can be reconstructed from the ground up through rational inquiry, as though the "givens" of the faith are negotiable:

[S]ince the time of the Enlightenment, the longest-running of all Christological heresies has deeply infiltrated the church with scarcely any protest or controversy, much less the calling of a council of bishops to clarify and defend the faith of the church.  I mean the replacement of the Christ of faith with the so-called historical Jesus. . . . I speak of the repudiation of the church's faith in the resurrected Lord and the replacement of that faith with a Jesus reconstructed solely on the basis of what history can reliably tell us, as measured by the methods of the modern critical historian.  This view has become so widespread and has received so little opposition -- especially in liberal forms of Christianity -- that in some circles it is regarded as the best available theology rather than as a dreadful distortion of the truth of the gospel.

At the same time, Johnson resists any temptation to expand the scope of what is "given":

The simplicity of the creed is notable first in those matters on which it speaks.  The creed consistently affirms what without trying to specify how, and thus liberates in two ways: the minds of believers are free to examine and investigate, without constraint, the gaps left within by the creed's propositions, and their minds are not imprisoned by extraneous and possibly unworthy explanations or elaborations.  The creed thus provides a stable confession within which the faithful can find a variety of acceptable standpoints and interpretations. . . the creed gives boundaries, not barriers.

Rob