New Testament scholar's analysis corrects extreme beliefs

Although few ponder the routine act, many millions of American Christians do something radical when they recite the creed, says New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson.

In a country that praises individualism, worshippers are expressing solidarity with a community's collective wisdom rather than personal opinions, Johnson explains.

And in a culture that prizes novelty, they are reciting a formula that originated 1,788 years ago (for the Apostles' Creed, often used by Protestants) or 1,678 years ago (for the similar but longer Nicene Creed, part of Roman Catholic and Orthodox worship).

Johnson, a one-time Benedictine monk, is now a lay Catholic teaching at Atlanta-based Emory University's Methodist-related seminary. His latest book, "The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters" (Doubleday), provides analysis of the creeds' role and a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Nicene version.

Adding a bit of autobiography, Johnson says fellow academics show little regard for the intellect of people like himself who adhere to fixed formulas of faith and are especially offended by Christianity's creeds.

Defining central beliefs

Yet he says "life in the world is not possible without some form of creed." Even researchers in the "hard" sciences know "they cannot demonstrate their basic premises but must accept them on faith."

To Johnson, the Christian creed offers "the world's true story," not some "alternative view," or "Christian opinion" or truth for this or that individual, but truth for everyone. Nowhere else, he writes, "is such an alternative vision of the world and of humanity so clearly stated."

Against liberal theologians, Johnson insists Jesus' divinity was not a later belief the creeds tacked onto Christianity but an element in people's earliest attempts to comprehend Jesus. He also says the creeds explain the teachings in the New Testament rather than adding anything to them.

Johnson sees the creeds as defining what is central for all Christians, thus providing a corrective against both Christianity's extreme left and extreme right.

He argues against those conservative Protestants who reject creeds in favor of following the "Bible alone," and against liberal Protestants who don't want to be hemmed in by doctrinal requirements.

In Johnson's opinion, fundamentalists take marginal concepts such as the literal inspiration and "inerrancy" (factual perfection) of the Bible and make them essentials, then turn sectarian and exclude those who disagree.

The left's mistake, Johnson continues, is to make the faith too open and boundless in its inclusion, offering little sense of what is required of a believer and leaving the church unable to answer the simple question, "What does it mean to be a Christian?"

'Jesus is Lord'

Conservatives compound problems, he feels, by identifying Christianity with a political ideology that ignores economic justice, while liberals are equally rigid in demanding that Christians follow the latest demands of the political left.

Some brief history:

The earliest Christian creed, it's often said, was the New Testament's simple statement, "Jesus is Lord." Those words were more radical than might be apparent because they asserted Jesus' divinity by using a title Jews applied only to God. More developed statements of faith appear in the New Testament and during the subsequent century.

The Apostles' Creed originated in a question-and-answer format, probably used for baptism rituals, found in the "Apostolic Tradition" by Hippolytus. The Nicene Creed was developed by 318 bishops at the first ecumenical council at Nicea (in present-day Turkey) and refined at a synod in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) decades later.

In A.D. 589, a council at Toledo, Spain, decided the creed would say that within the triune God, the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son," adding the phrase "and the Son." The popes adopted the innovation without agreement by Eastern Christians, laying ground for the great and tragic Catholic-Orthodox schism centuries later.