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<\/p>\nThis year Christians are marking the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea\u2013at least those Christians who care about or who are aware of such things.\u00a0One Sunday not that long ago, I decided to pay close attention to the words of the Nicene Creed when it showed up as it does every Sunday morning in the Episcopal liturgy right after the homily. People usually pay about as much attention to the text of the Creed as they do to the words of the Lord\u2019s Prayer\u2014but try it sometime. \u201cWow,\u201d I thought as I said the words, \u201cthere\u2019s some pretty weird stuff in here. I\u2019m not sure that I believe all of this.\u201d<\/p>\n
I mentioned this to my Living Stones seminar, the monthly Adult Christian Education group that I led after the service; one woman said that she took \u201ccomfort\u201d in the fact that when she recites the Nicene Creed, she\u2019s reciting the same words that certain Christians have been reciting for over 1500 years. I confessed that I didn\u2019t know why a list of beliefs that hasn\u2019t changed in over 1500 years would be \u201ccomforting,\u201d but there\u2019s no accounting for taste. I also mentioned that comfort is vastly overrated in my opinion, especially in the life of faith, but that didn\u2019t seem to budge her from her preference for religious truths that are set in stone.<\/p>\n
The Nicene Creed was on my mind that Sunday because it had been part of the discussion in one of my seminars with a bunch of freshmen the previous week. In the interdisciplinary course I teach in, we were in the middle of early Christianity; the readings for the day were essays about two of the central doctrines of the Christian faith from two fourth-century theologians: Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity, and Athanasius on the Incarnation. And despite my best efforts, my eighteen freshmen\u2014many of them the products of twelve years of Catholic parochial education\u2014had little to say.<\/p>\n
I reminded the students of the underlying issue at the heart of Athanasius\u2019 discussion: How are Christians to understand the Second Person of the Trinity? I also reminded them of the various competing possibilities raised by my theologian colleague and teaching teammate in his setup lecture a few days earlier. Sabellius, Ebion, Arius, the Monophysites, the Docetists, and many others were jockeying for position with their varying suggestions along with the eventual winning proposal promoted by Athanasius and others, the position ultimately incorporated into the Nicene Creed:<\/p>\n
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light,\u00a0true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.<\/strong><\/p>\n The Creed\u2019s claim concerning Jesus is that he was not just a human being with special divine favor, nor was he a divine being pretending to be human, nor was he less than God the Father, nor was he some strange mixture or brew of divinity and humanity stirred together in a new ontological concoction. He was \u201cbegotten,\u201d not \u201cmade.\u201d \u201cWhatever,\u201d my students\u2019 faces were saying. \u201cWho gives a shit?\u201d they were thinking. \u201c\u2019Is this going to be on the test?\u2019 they were wondering. So, I asked them a different question.<\/p>\n \u201cSuppose you were a fourth-century Christian woman or man,\u201d I began. \u201cNot a theologian or anyone special, just an ordinary, garden variety person claiming to be a Christian. All you want to know is \u2018How should I live today in real time, at work, with my family and friends, interacting with my neighbors and strangers, as a Christian? What does this faith I profess require of me today?\u2019 Would either of the texts we read for today provide such a person with any practical guidance? Would reading Hilary or Athanasius help an aspiring Christian figure out how to live her or his faith more effectively and fruitfully?\u201d No one said anything immediately, but several students began slowly shaking their heads. \u201cI don\u2019t think so,\u201d one of them finally offered tentatively. Then what is the point? Who cares? Why are we wasting our time with this?<\/strong><\/p>\n I have told my freshmen before that \u201cSo what?\u2019 is the best philosophical question one can ask, but they didn\u2019t expect me to actually ask it in the context of matters that many of them have been taught involve one\u2019s eternal soul.<\/p>\n A favorite book of mine that speaks to these issues is Sara Miles\u2019 Take This Bread<\/em>, a memoir account of what a faith commitment to Christianity looks like to a dedicated left-wing progressive atheist who found herself knocked on her ass by something greater than herself, uninvited and unexpected, after wandering into a Sunday service in a San Francisco Episcopal church. Unencumbered by doctrine, dogma, or what she was \u201csupposed to believe,\u201d Miles frequently found herself running afoul of religious expectations and commitments as she sought to organize a food pantry in her new church along the lines of generosity described by Jesus, asking\u2014in the words of one of her friends and partners in irreverence\u2014\u201cWhat the fuck would Jesus do?\u201d<\/p>\n Her church, Saint Gregory\u2019s of Nyssa Episcopal, pastored by a couple of progressive priests who over the years had crafted an unusual and creative Sunday liturgical celebration within the very flexible boundaries of The Book of Common Prayer, did not include the Nicene Creed as part of its services. Miles never encountered the Creed until she accompanied Paul, one of St. Gregory\u2019s associate priests, one summer to an Episcopal retreat in North Carolina. \u201cWhat was that Creed thing?\u201d she asked the priest after reading it for the first time in a service. \u201cIt\u2019s like saying the Pledge of Allegiance in second grade!\u201d Paul, remarkably, told her the unvarnished truth.<\/p>\n It\u2019s basically a toxic document, set up to standardize belief and overturn heresies and draw a sharp line between us and them.<\/strong><\/p>\n Paul had similar things to say during a later conversation with Sara as they talked about various ways, over the centuries, that religions have sought to control access and membership; in doing so, we seek to tame and domesticate the divine. \u201c\u2019It\u2019s kind of crazy talk,\u2019 said Paul once, trying to explain the official rules of Eucharist to me. \u2018It only happens if the right person with the right stuff says the right words.\u2019\u201d But Sara, observes,<\/p>\n \u201cRightness\u201d was always more about licensing requirements than about God; the human lines drawn to regulate priestly ordination extended and wrapped round the Eucharist like barbed wire, binding the sacrament to rules about who could be a valid, official celebrant and who could be excluded.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the most persistent stumbling blocks to dynamic faith is the continuing attempts of religions folks from all sides of the spectrum to codify, systematize, and clarify that which, by its very nature, is resistant to all of the above. As Miles notes, each \u201cthink[s] they can control God like a piece of technology and that they\u2019re the only ones who have the secret code.\u201d But, of course, the divine is not a piece of technology, is not manageable, and cannot be domesticated.<\/p>\n There are times when I wish I had come to faith as Sara Miles did, with no prior experience, no preconceptions, and no one telling me from my earliest remembrance what I am supposed to believe. The truth that Miles encountered strikes me as clean, clear, and . . . well . . . true.<\/p>\n Rather than protecting me and sealing me off in a community of shared doctrine and rules, this truth thrusts me into the wildness of faith. I don\u2019t need a creed to artificially connect me with other believers: It\u2019s the ragged vastness of our different spiritual lives that points, for me, to a larger force . . . None of us, fundamentalist or radical or orthodox, Muslim or Jew or Christian, can adequately sum God up . . . Isn\u2019t it reasonable to assume that there isn\u2019t one single template for human belief, one single way to get it right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This year Christians are marking the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea\u2013at least those Christians who care about or who are aware of such things.\u00a0One Sunday not that long ago, I decided to pay close attention to the words of the Nicene Creed when it showed up as it does every Sunday morning in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":33767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,35,40,48,57,62],"tags":[169,221,242,289,1152,708],"class_list":["post-33758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christianity","category-faith","category-god","category-human-nature","category-jesus","category-liturgy","tag-christianity","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-jesus","tag-nicene-creed","tag-sara-miles"],"yoast_head":"\n