Episode 18: David Bentley Hart – What’s the Deal with the Creeds?

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

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Pete

Attention pupils, it’s that time of year again! Summer school classes are upon us and we’re starting with our June class called “Not Kirk Cameron’s Apocalypse: A More Robust and Colorful Look at the End Times Described in John’s Revelation” taught by Dr. Lynn R. Huber. 

Jared

That’s quite the title. That’s a very Bible for Normal People title.

Pete

That’s like one of my books. The title is basically a chapter. 

Jared

Exactly. Anyway, in this one night class, Dr. Huber will define what an apocalypse is, and what it isn’t, and why the author of Revelation might have chosen this language found in the last book of the Christian Bible. 

Pete

And topics we’ll cover in the class is for example, who wrote Revelation and why the use of apocalyptic imagery is found there, and the gendered imagery use in Revelation—

Jared

Oh, that’s interesting.

Pete

That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. And how have people read Revelation throughout history. A lot of stuff is being covered there.

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Pete  

Today on Faith for Normal People, I’m talking about the Christian creeds with David Bentley Hart. Now David is so well known, I’m sure, to many of you. He’s a writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar. He’s a critic, he’s an Eastern Orthodox theologian with many, many books, including a New Testament translation published by Yale press. And don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time where Jared will join me and we’ll dig into our own education around the creeds and how we think about them as part of our own faith today. Alright folks, let’s dive right in.

Intro  

David  

Intro  

Pete  

Knock this off your bucket list now, David, you’ve been on the Bible and Faith for Normal People podcast. Well, listen, let’s talk about creeds and we’re going to discuss this because I’ve run into a lot of people, over the years, who have a lot of questions about creeds and what are they and things like that, and why do we bother? And I know that you’ve thought an awful lot about these things. And I thought we would just get into it by, say, you know, really bottom line: What is a creed?

David  

Well, I think that they were instituted or appeared spontaneously, fairly early in Christian tradition as a way of cementing a particular identity and community that didn’t have any outward signs. This is before churches were built, before basilicas existed, before there were priestly vestments, and the appanages of the clerical class or anything of that sort. So they were a very basic and necessary part of, way of affirming that this was a religion of choice that had contents to which one was assenting and that the confession itself was sort of a participation in the saving act of faith. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

David  

I think they’re very much a special part of any- Well, I mean, as missionary religions go, I mean, in a sense, you have seen the same thing in Buddhism in that in its early forums as it spread, it spread itself through the enunciation of particular principles to which people assented—you know, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path—so I think this is, just speaking, structurally natural for a religion of choice, you know, a faith of chosen inclusion. And in the case of Christianity, I think so much of the language of scripture is about confession and praise as being the mark of the age to come, that all things in heaven and on earth and below the earth would ultimately joyously confess, joyously praise God, that the very act of confession had a special significance in Christianity, but not the same way as in any other religion.

Pete  

You know, the natural way that some confessions will arise for community identity, and things like that, it’s been said that, you know, the Judaism out of which the Christian movement grew was not a credal religion. Would you agree with that?

David  

Well, it depends. I mean, obviously, what we think of Judaism now is Rabbinic Judaism, which was only just emerging at the same time that Christianity was. But even within Christ’s own time, there are confessional forms or you know, Shema Yisrael, Adonai [unsure of word], Adonai [unsure of word]. There are affirmations, at least in that stream of Judaism that would become the Rabbinic tradition. And in the Second Temple period, there were certainly any number of sects or devotions that were special, you know, that involved, say baptism or setting yourself apart in a special community, like the Essenes that had a specific set of beliefs. And I would imagine, might even have had spoken confessions of faith. 

So I think we always overgeneralize when we talk about Judaism because, of course, it was a diverse phenomenon in Christ’s time, it was only evolving into what we now understand as Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, would become the mainstream tradition. And much of the Judaism of Christ’s time has disappeared, has left few marks behind. I mean the Second Temple Apocalyptic literature for most people in the Jewish world, matter of scholarly interests. It’s not part of the living religious tradition. A lot of it was assumed into Christianity, but in a transformed way, obviously. So yeah, I would, I would say generalizations of this sort are better avoided.

Pete  

Right. Well, let’s just—give us a quick rundown, a thirty thousand foot view here, of the ancient Christian creeds. Like, what were the main ones and maybe we can talk about distinctives of them. Again, not to get too deep into the weeds here, just a quick overview.

David  

I mean, the earliest Christian creed seems just to have been Iisoús eínai Kýrios you know, “Jesus is Lord.” But, for instance, the Philippians hymn, there’s some evidence that Paul there is quoting, if not a kind of hymnody in a kind of confession, about the person of Christ, you know, who had a right to the form of a God, to live to be like a god is what the Greek actually says, and chose instead, the form of a servant. And this is laid out in what looks like a confessional form. The didache, the early—which was somewhere in time in the first century—the latter half of the first century—has a lot of credal material in it, as well as instructions on the life of faith, many of which of, “not holding on to your private possessions,” things that were part of the early church that we tended to abandon fairly quickly, [Chuckles] once Christianity spread among the propertied class. And then there are these odd things like Aristides of Athens, there’s a creed—There’s the old Roman symbol, might be very early third century, there are other—I mean there are creeds from groups that have since fallen out of favor like the Arians because they definitely had confessional…

Pete  

Well, David, how about the—I mean, the Apostles creed is one that a lot of people know, they at least maybe recite it, they know it, how old is that? Do we know when that might have been written?

David  

You know, the truth of the matter is that we really don’t know. Some people think that adds to date and provided the template for later creeds. But a lot of historical evidence suggests that it’s a Western creed, maybe from Gaul, from the post Nicene period, maybe from the period of the Christological controversies, fifth century. So it’s hard to say. There’s something called the “Apostles creed” that, very late in the fourth century, is mentioned. You know, about the end of the Capidocean Fathers period, after Nicaea Constantinople. 

Pete  

So the apostles didn’t write it? 

David  

Oh, no, no, no, most definitely not—

Pete  

Well, that’s an assumption I think that many people might make, just encountering it for the first time. 

David  

Well, I actually think, for myself, that there is an older symbol that the later version that we know as the Apostles creed was based on and I think that symbol really might be older than the Nicene. I’m just not sure.

Pete  

Well, that’s, I think not being sure is a really good answer because sometimes we’re too sure about things we shouldn’t be sure about.

David  

Well, and to be honest, we know very little about the dating of a lot of documents. In fact, we have a better sense of the dates of a lot of documents we’ve lost because they’re reported to have existed at a certain time, whereas things that we [Chuckles] retained are often poorly attested and, you know, we get estimates that vary by centuries.

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Pete  

You mentioned Nicene and Constantinople, could you talk about those two creeds? They’re connected, aren’t they, those two?

David  

It’s one and the same creed. What we now call the Nicene creed is really the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed. In its original form, it didn’t have the material of the Holy Spirit, it mentioned the Holy Spirit, but that was it. “We believe in the Holy Spirit,” but there’s no definite. And the connection of the Holy Spirit to the ecclesial confession, you know, “one baptism for the remission of sins,” that was added at the Council of Constantinople, the second Ecumenical Council. And it’s important because of course, after Nicaea, the debates that had led to Nicaea didn’t end. The position that the Arians represented was actually a well established orthodoxy—if you want, a small ‘O’ if you like—in the eastern part of the Christian world, it wasn’t the eccentric view of a strange man who suddenly decided to break with the immemorial consensus of the church, it was—

Pete  

And could you just quickly define the Arian movement?

David  

Well, Arius, though he’s remembered as the chief heretic of the fourth century, the one who had to be overcome for the first credal definition, that of Nicaea, the first council that could be called once Christianity was the tolerated religion adopted by Constantine—he was in the tradition of Alexandrian thought, which was subordinationist, that is that saw Christ as a deuteros theos, a secondary god. What that meant at the time, was in much of the ancient church, in the ancient Christian world, in the ancient classical Jewish world of late antiquity, and also in much pagan thought, it was believed that God in himself, in his most high transcendence, that is God the Father, or the Yahweh himself, was beyond all contact with lower reality, so transcendent that there could be no direct commerce between him and the reality below. So the son was understood as a secondary, subordinate, and lower manifestation of the divine. 

Now, what kind? Well, for many, he was the angel of mighty council, he was the great angel who led the chorus of heaven. So there was a sort of indistinction between the sense in which he was generated and the sense in which he was a creature. There just wasn’t a clear distinction in that regard in many minds. Some would say that he was generated just before creation, for the sake of creation. Others, that he was created, because, you know, “this day has now created me,” you know, there is a scriptural language there to draw, so to speak. The truth is that Arius was in that tradition of subordination. It said that the most high God is beyond this world. The son is the viceroy of God and, for all intents and purposes, God in relation to creation, and the spirit is a subordinate agency of the son. 

Arius insisted that you had to think of the son as a creature, at least so we’re told. And this is what led to the great debate, because there were other traditions just as old as that Alexandrian tradition, probably, that said, no, that in fact, the son was not created, but was a monogenís, or as we often translate it, “only begotten,” but that’s actually questionable. [Chuckles] The unique son of God meant that he was divine in a way that they put it beyond the merely creaturely. And as the theology developed for theological reasons, as much as biblical because the biblical evidence supported both sides, depending on how you read it, was co-equal with the father. And here, there was a theological issue, that is, that if you believe that salvation is direct union with God, deification of the creature, that God became a human so that humans could become divine, only God can unite creatures to God. Creatures don’t have the power themselves. So if Christ can unite us to God, he must truly be God. And if the spirit can unite us to Christ, the spirit too must be God. 

So by the time of Constantinople, the focus had shifted. The debates went on. There were those who still didn’t like Nicaea, they still wanted some way to rescue the old Alexandrian tradition, and they were also adverse to the notion that the spirit should also be given divine titles. Whereas the same- Whereas the Nicene party wanted to complete this [unintelligible]. [Laughs] No, the spirit- And so in Constantinople, the spirit is included in the creed in a way that he wasn’t at Nicaea because the debate had moved on. Even then, the wording is vague. You know, “we believe in the Holy Spirit,” right? “Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the father, and together with the father and son is worshiped and glorified,” but you notice he’s never called “God.” The son is never called “God.” The creed stays still with that point, because they were very careful about how these words worked. It’s still the word “God,” in the creed is basically a reference to the father. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

David  

O Theos in Greek, “God” with the article “the.” The God.

Pete  

That’s—I mean, that, to me, that’s fascinating. And I’m channeling here, you know, many conversations I’ve had with people about the insistence that clear Trinitarian language is embedded in the New Testament itself and the creeds were elucidating what is there. And others are of the opinion that, “Well, no, the creeds are going beyond the language of the New Testament, because the context has changed rather dramatically in several hundred years.” What’s your thinking about that difference of opinion?

David  

Oh, well, the former party is correct. There’s no clear and unambiguous Trinitarian language in the New Testament. The closest we come to it is in chapter 20 of John, the risen Christ is addressed by Thomas it appears as ho Kyrios mou kai ho Theos mou as “My Lord and my God,” again, with the article in both sentences which would seem to be it’s making equal to the father. But of course, in the prologue of John, O Theos seems to be identified not as O Theos, but simply as Theos. So it’s hard to tell, because there are rules about predication that could make that understandable, but whatever the case, no, I don’t. For instance, I don’t believe that, if you would ask the Apostle Paul to discourse on these things, he would have given you a later Trinitarian formulation or anything like the Christology of Chalcedonian. I think a lot of these things remained vague and undefined. 

If you look at Nicaea and if you separate it from the imperial politics of the time—which demanded that there had to be a common confession, because the emperor was not at all pleased to learn that his new religion was divided internally in matters of rather foundational theology—the reason the Nicene party won, still was that theirs was a superior theological gloss of the scriptures. That is, as I said, the logic of what unites us to God can only be God. If we’re thinking in terms of this subordinate hierarchy of reduced powers, défteros theós, you know, secondary God, trítos theós, tertiary God, then God, in a sense, remains as separated as he was from us before the incarnation. 

And so because the Nicene party was very much in that sort of Athanasian tradition of believing that there’s a miraculous exchange that occurs in the Incarnation—that the divine and the human go both ways, so to speak, that the divine enters the human, that the human may truly enter into the divine—they won the debate. But both parties could very plausibly read the Bible according to their theology. Even chapter 20 of John, there were plenty of ways which go, “Well, this is an honorific,” at that moment as the risen one, Thomas is praising Christ as “the adopted,” almost as if he’s so fully accomplished the work of God in history, that he can adopt the titles of God himself. And I think, you know, Hebrews clearly gives you a Christology that could be read in many ways, including a subordinationst one. 

The Philippians hymn is not a clear statement about God to say—again, when you actually read the Greek, what it really says would fit equally well to this notion of Jesus as the angel of mighty council, you know. Because even in Christian usage, “Theos” was a word that theologians, Church Fathers were happy to use of angels, of saints that had been entered into that [unintelligible], only O Theos enjoyed that special reverential reference only to God in his full transcendence. And what the Greek of the Philippians hymn said is not that he was in the form of God and chose to enter the form of a slave. What it says is, [Chuckles] “It would not have been a robbery on his part to exist like a god.” Isos Theo. “Isa” there isn’t “Isos,” isn’t “equal with” and it isn’t “equality with God.” Okay? That, again, is a mistranslation. It’s an adverb that simply means, “like, in the matter of, a divine being.” So yeah, those who want to see the creeds as just natural emanations of New Testament theology unfolding inexorably from principles that are explicitly there are deceiving themselves. That’s not what happened. It was a theological appropriation of the language of scripture, according to a more fully worked out understanding of what had happened in Jesus.

Pete  

But even there, I mean, again, I find this very interesting. I think others will, too, that even the credal tradition—the fourth century credal tradition, which we were talking about before—was a little bit careful. I’m thinking, particularly, you know, I get these discussions online all the time, but “Jesus is God.” And I’m saying, “What do you mean by that? How do you unpack that?” Right? 

David  

You don’t. Well, “Jesus is Lord.” No. And there’s no statement that he’s a god in the sense of O Theos, again, only in John chapter 20 do you have an intimation of that sort of language and even then, for many early Christians, it would have been explicable in wholly different terms. In fact, I mean, there were those who thought that, you know, it’s not actually in the vocative. He doesn’t say [Greek]. So, is he saying “this one is my Lord and my God?” Or is he saying “this one, now, is worthy of the titles of the Most High?” Or is he just…Is it an exclamation of praise for the God beyond, whom he can’t address directly? [Greek]. All of these possibilities would have been entertained and were entertained by the early exegetes.

Pete  

It sounds a little like Paul—that second option, at least—where it’s by virtue of resurrection that he is endowed with the title “Lord.” I don’t really see…

David  

Well—

Pete  

.people talking about Jesus that way, walking around doing miracles, for example.

David  

Right. And in fact, he doesn’t talk about Jesus’s ministry very much at all, really. The lordship, he is exalted above all other beings, given the name higher than every other name. But, you know, as you know, early Christians, there were many adoptionist Christians who saw him as a man who had been deified in resurrection. And given these divine titles and elevated above the angels, there were those who saw him, and this is how they’ve read the Philippians, as—I say, the angel of mighty counsel—The dominant view, obviously, was that a divine being had descended through the spheres, but divine in what sense? And again, I can only urge this, I’ve been attacked for this by Thomists, for instance, and others, Calvinists and Fundamentalists, who don’t know the history. For pointing out that Arius was not an innovator. Nicaea, the innovators were what we think of as the Orthodox and their innovation was to come up with a new terminology—the word homoousios was never used in Christian theology before. That’s why they were considered sort of radicals, dangerous—

Pete  

“Being of one substance with the father.” Right?

David  

Right. Yeah, that’s a non-biblical word. They had to invent a new vocabulary in order to give shape to their theological reading of what had happened in Christ. But as I say—Well, let’s just say there’s certain camps within the Christian world in which the, sort of, the simpler story that, you know, Jesus came, he taught something that was immediately adopted in a uniform version and persisted for some time until then, for reasons that we can’t even begin to guess, began to break us apart because certain persons seized by the perverse desire to, I don’t know, achieve celebrity or to create division for the sake of division, began coming up with new theologies that Arius and Eunomius and all those followed him were inventing these things out of whole cloth in order to disrupt a prior consensus. 

That’s utter nonsense. We know, from the New Testament, that the very first generation of Christians were theologically all over the place. I mean, you know, The Johannine epistles, that there were those who had to be expelled from certain communities because—well, it’s unclear, maybe because they denied the concrete fleshliness of the Incarnation. It’s not quite clear—but we know that there were- Well, the Epistle of James is largely directed against other Christian communities and explaining what they’ve got wrong. The book of Revelation, as far as I’m concerned, is written by a certain kind of Christian who believes you have to be an observant Jew to be a Christian. And then when he talks about the synagogue of Satan, he’s probably talking about Christians like the ones that Paul evangelized, you know? So the notion that there was some prior consensus theologically or sacramentally, or you know, is just is simply not the case. And nor does it have to be. Because one shouldn’t necessarily expect that the experience of the presence of God in human history is immediately going to come with a book of instructions.

Pete  

And that’s the strength I think, in things that you’ve talked about before that I’ve read. I guess the beauty of a tradition, rather than expecting things to be simply locked down in the biblical text itself—which is itself a tradition that has developed and moved and there’s been disagreement and debates and things like that.

David  

Yep. No, a tradition is a thing worth living in. But a doctrinal system is a thing worth tearing apart.

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Pete  

Let’s close out of it here talking about the value of the creeds. I mean, you mentioned identity and community building and that sense of community identity. In a sense, the developments of creeds are inevitable?

David  

Well, it depends on what you mean by inevitable. In one sense, they were inevitable for political reasons, because the institutional church became a pillar of imperial society and you can’t really… I mean, if that’s going to be the case, that it can’t be too latitudinarian in what it will tolerate among believers. So there has to be a unity of confession, and a unity of practice, and a unity of obedience. But also, in other ways it is so, I think it’s inevitable in a religion like Christianity, because, of course, it’s proposing that something happened, that you’re trying to understand. It’s not simply a spiritual path. It’s not a collection of spiritual councils, though those are there. As are the moral commands. 

But it’s also making proposals about the vital events within the course of human history that had an eternal meaning. And that’s going to require a definition. However, I would also point out, if you look at the creeds that were actually formed, most of them are accommodations, they actually are incredibly minimalist in their formulation. And this is something that goes too often misunderstood, especially later years, and especially after the Reformation period, when everything became an issue of contending theology and Rome redefined what an ecumenical Council was and started adopting councils that were not really ecumenical, as it did involve both East and West and all the different Patricaids. But the early creeds, the ones that I think should be taken seriously, nonetheless, are extremely minimal in formulation. And not everybody who lives in the tradition seems to understand that the theological concepts with which they phrase the language aren’t necessarily there at the beginning. The Nicene creed is still not a fully developed Trinitarian theology of the sort that every Catholic seminarian, for instance, takes for granted. 

I’ve seen in recent years a lot of converts to Orthodoxy—for those who don’t know I’m Eastern Orthodox—for a lot of converts to Orthodoxy from the Evangelical world. And Evangelicals, though they like to think that they’re a non-credal tradition, are anything but. I mean, they like faith statements like the back of their hand, they have absolutely, very strict and precise notions of what language is correct and how you’re supposed to think. And the ones who have come into orthodoxy, many of them have brought that attitude with them. You know, recently I wrote a book on Universalism. And there’s this fellow named David Bradshaw, who is a convert to orthodoxy, and he says, “Well, it’s clear from, you know, Orthodox confession and hymnodies that the Orthodox can’t, no Orthodox can be a Universalist.”

Now, in empirical terms, this is obviously false, because there have been quite a lot of them [Chuckles] down the centuries going back to, you, know, Origen the great who was perfectly orthodox at his time, but Gregory of Nyssa, and Isaac, etc. and all these other figures right up into the 20th century, when almost every important Russian theologian was either fully or largely Universalist—but also this sort of pontifical statement is based on this incredibly rigid understanding of how you’re allowed to read certain kinds of language. Well, there’s plenty of Universalist language in Orthodox liturgy and in Orthodox confession as well, just as there is in the New Testament. And the funny thing is, a lot of the [unintelligible], I’ve gotten very little criticism from my, you know, like the book did very well in Greece, and very few people suggested that this is heresy because there are revered 20th century saints like Elder Porphyrios and [saint name] and others who were pretty much Universalists and this was understood. 

And yet, here you have, someone who tried to treat the tradition as a set of absolute propositional certitudes, and that’s just not what creeds are. That’s not what they are, why they’re important is precisely because they’re minimal. That is in their formulation. They create boundaries within which you can reason together on certain things, but they close down certain avenues. That is, alright, going forward, we’re going to have to somehow reckon with from Nicea and Constantinople, that the story of salvation we’ve been telling that, in Christ, we are directly united to God, requires a real co-equality of the son with the Father and of the spirit with the son. But how we understand that? We’re looking at Chalcedon and you know, and this different part is how, you know, Christ has two natures. One, epistasis. What does epistasis mean? Well, it Chalcedon—it’s not clear how that word is being used, because it was used very vaguely at Nicaea and later, the NeoCalcedonians give it a meeting that doesn’t really cohere with Nicaea, and probably doesn’t work, but it’s better than others. Then there are those who are called monophysites, but they actually really believe the same thing. They’re just using different language. 

There are those in the Syrian or Assyrian tradition, maybe believe something slightly different, but it’s impossible to tell because they’re using—first of all, they’re speaking half the time in Syriac and half the time in Greek and they’re using the terms very differently. All that Chalcedon did was try to establish a structural rule that we have to use certain tokens, certain words to indicate on the one hand, that Christ really is divine, really is human, in both senses, he really is fully human, really is fully divine. And yet, it’s not two different beings that have been amalgamated into a kind of Chimera. But which words we should use, the definitions are so vague that it’s more a matter of convention. So once this decision has been made, the creed is there. It sets up a certain number of guideposts, boundary markers, it closes off some of the old conversations, but it opens up immeasurably more wider conversations and that is the creed. What should never be the case is that one should simply think that one knows what the absolute theological content, what the propositional content of creeds are, because we don’t. Even the historians of doctrine really cannot tell you with absolute certitude what was meant by every word. And certainly one should not believe that they are to be accepted blindly. That was never—they are open invitations to spiritual and theological reasoning and contemplation.

Pete  

Well, if we all had that approach, I think maybe the world would be a happier place. I don’t know. 

Pete  

Well, listen, David, thank you very much for your time. This has been wonderful. 

David  

Thank you.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time.

Pete  

With Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Alright, so Jared, I interviewed David alone and it was a lot of fun. But I want to ask you, did you have—maybe a two part question—were creeds functional for you, like in your youth? Was that anything taught to you? And maybe the other part of that is, did that change for you at all? Like especially going through seminary, where we had a very large creed. 33 chapters long with footnotes. Which, did you, have you read that by the way? Did you ever actually read that from cover to cover? The Westminster Confession of Faith.

Jared  

No, no. I have three copies of it, but I haven’t read it all the way through.

Pete  

Okay. Give it to your friends. 

Jared  

Yeah. [Laughs]

Pete  

Okay. Anyway, so yeah, so what was it like for you to have credal or non-credal faith?

Jared  

My upbringing was probably anti-credal in practice, although clearly not in theory. And by that, again, charismatic, it was all about free expression and so things like tradition, were dismissed and demonized when it came to like—basically, there’s a spectrum and the closer you got to the Catholic Church, in anything that-

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

-Smelled like the Catholic Church, the worse it was. 

Pete  

Jared  

Now thinking about that going to a more reformed seminary, it’s like, “well, that was one thing that was consistent.”

Pete  

Jared  

We hate the same people. No wonder I was attracted to them. 

Pete  

Jared  

No, so I think the creeds smelled too Catholic. 

Pete  

Okay. Yeah. Right. 

Jared  

And anything that you just repeat over and over, that’s already been written that’s not a spontaneous expression of your faith was seen as not as genuine and not as mature. 

Pete  

Yes, right.

Jared  

As a genuine expression. So it wouldn’t have made sense to do. I mean, I grew up also Southern Baptist, and so my mom would often juxtapose those and even the Southern Baptist who do the same kind of things every week. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

That’s a little too traditional. 

Pete  

Okay. Yeah.

Jared  

Then going to Westminster again, I think because I’m more built to like structure, the creeds became more important and and credal thinking-

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

-You know, like the Westminster Confession of Faith. Those kinds of things, or even more structure was more like the shorter catechism or things where there’s question and answer. 

Pete  

Right, uh-huh.

Jared  

So those kinds of things did much, I appreciated that. And so I did like being introduced to it. And then later in life, now, you know, more liturgy repeating the same things. 

Pete  

Uh-huh.

Jared  

Having these things that we all- I love the idea that there are these creeds that, you know, millions of people around the world adopt every week. I like that sense of community. But no, it would be starting off in the opposite of that. 

Pete  Yeah. Yeah, I’d say for me, you know, I have like a mixed relationship with creeds. I, when I was a kid, and my sister and I went to our Lutheran catechism thing, every Wednesday night for two years, one thing we did is we all had to memorize the Nicene creed. And to this day, like when I’m in church, it’s like, I don’t need my book open. [Laughs] I can do it without that. So it was sort of interesting. You know, we talked about it a little bit, but I think that the further along I got, especially in studying, you know, the Bible in context, I looked at- I started looking at the creeds with a lot of skepticism like, these are simply culturally conditioned articulations of their understanding [Chuckles] of the implications of the biblical tradition. Because I’m pretty adamant- Paul wouldn’t have known what to do with the Nicene creed, and Jesus either quite honestly, you know?

Jared  

Mhmm, right.

Pete  

And then that doesn’t make the creed wrong. Right. So I went through a sort of a superiority, kind of, complex relationship with the creeds like saying, “Listen they’re just… They’re fine, I guess.” But I think the older I get, I respect the flexibility of theological thinking on the part of those who brought that together. And David was helpful in this interview when he said, they’re basically conversation starters. Even if it looks like it’s fine tuned language, you get to talk about what being of the same substance with the father means, you get to discuss that. They’re more guardrails for discussions that are very wide ranging. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

And that says, “Okay, listen, now we’re onto something.” And also the creeds do, what I argue has happened since the even before we had a Bible, which is contextualized things in, you know, taking older traditions and new contexts, reaffirming but also restating sometimes disagreeing and I see the the ancient creeds, which are, you know, basically Eastern Orthodox creeds of people, putting the tradition in language that is meaningful for them at the moment. That’s the entire history of theology. So it’s, there’s a respect there, and then I can dive into it as long as I’m not told, “And this is the final word, this creed, you’ve got to believe what it says, and there’s no debate about what it means.” And for David, that’s anathema. You just don’t do that. And I agree with that. I think that’s that’s a rather foolish way of reading some pretty, you know, heady, theological articulations.

Jared  

Well, this is off topic. But when you said that you had to memorize the Nicene creed in church, it made me think, another kind of credal thing for me was the Lord’s Prayer. 

Pete  

Jared  

And I memorized the the Lord’s Prayer, because growing up in Texas, we said the Lord’s Prayer before every baseball game.

Pete  

Really? 

Jared  

Yeah. So I don’t know how that would fly. I don’t know what the like, you know, I don’t know the implications of separation of church and state there. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

But yeah, so that’s when I learned it, from the fact that we had to repeat it every baseball game. And so that was probably actually that was probably the most credal thing I did.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Because it was every game. We said the Lord’s Prayer. Interesting, but but the larger implication of what you’re saying, I think, is important as this ongoing conversation, which we come back to it again, and again, that when we only have categories of “is it right or is it wrong?” Regardless of what side we’re on of that whether we think it’s right or we think it’s wrong, that type of thinking, stifles the conversation and the understanding. So when somebody says, “Are the creeds wrong, or the creeds right?” It’s like, “Well, the creeds were useful in that time as an articulation of how we’re melding together.” You know, as Gadamer says, “These merging of horizons,” we have our context and out culture-

Pete  

Like the ancient biblical horizon and the whatever quote, yeah- 

Jared  

Yeah, whatever quote. There’s always this and I’m reminded too, of even Lambert on the episode we did with Lambert and on Bible for Normal People, is this understanding that what something means is always in relation to the context. 

Pete  

Jared  

So what did the Bible mean in the fourth century? That’s what the creeds tell us. 

Pete  

Jared  

But what does the Bible mean in the 21st century? That’s, we still are working that out. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It is the “Bible plus”, always it’s never just the Bible. 

Pete  

Yeah. 

Jared  

So it’s, I just think it’s wrongheaded to think about it in terms of right and wrong, but to think about it in terms of, “Okay, what can we learn from that community and what they were wrestling with and the language they had available to them?”

Pete  

That’s- I think that’s key. What were they wrestling with? Because one thing that has turned me off to creeds is people using them as sort of like the unalterable gold standard for how you think. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

And you know, Tom Wright, he’s got this great thing where he complains about credal theology and it says, you know, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,” and in his British accent he’s like, “And Matthew saying, ‘Hold on. I spent a lot of time with all that stuff in the middle,'” right? So I find that to be a just a reminder, not of the inadequacy of the creed. But what is the creed trying to do? It’s basically trying to do, “Who is Jesus and how does he connect all this and who’s the spirit? How does he connect with all this stuff?” So, and it’s not trying to answer all our questions so it is an inadequate, it’s not a gold standard. It’s an inadequate, but all creeds are inadequate. But getting back to things of like mystery that we’ve talked about, right, all creeds are at the end of the day, inadequate for capturing the totality of what we’re talking about. There are more ways of talking almost, I mean, they’re more than this, but sort of like conversation starters within certain parameters. And let’s see where we come up with that. So as parameters in general, it’s fine. But it’s not the thing you go to to say, “And this proves while you can’t say this today.”

Jared  

Well, a lot of times I think-

Pete  

It makes sense-

Jared  

-There’s like credal statements, whether we’re talking about the literal creeds or our own modern day, you know, analogs of creeds.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Our dogmatics. It’s a way to not have to admit our finitude, what you just said, that we all have limits, we are not going to put our arms around God. And I think that’s scary because again, knowledge is power and so we lose some sense of control or power, when we acknowledge that we don’t know it all. And I think that’s okay. But the problem is, then, when our fear of that hurts other people. When we exclude and say “No, you’re wrong, because we don’t want to admit-” Well, what would we put as our creed—think of face statements on church websites.

Pete  

Right. Mhmm.

Jared  

You’re telling me these 13 things encapsulate the entirety of the Christian religion for the last three thousand years? 

Pete  

Yeah, pretty much.

Jared  

No! You’re selective, too. But to acknowledge that…

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Then it becomes—there’s a lot of implications when we acknowledge what we’re talking about.

Pete  

Right. credal statements can be very beneficial, if we don’t eliminate our humanity and our context and our experience, I think.

Jared  

Yeah, allowing them to be what they probably were intended to be, but certainly are now. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Alright. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Well-

Pete  

That was great. We figured that one out, definitely.

Jared  

Cross it off the list. 

Pete  

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.

Pete  

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Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. You can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.  

Outro