2. Belief
2
Belief
The Place of the Creeds in the Life of Faith
In this chapter, I shall reflect on the place of the creeds in the life of faith. It is a wonderful theme, allowing me to open up the way in which these summaries of faith can help us with the business of Christian discipleship. It is a topic that many have addressed before me, including John Pearson, bishop of Chester from 1673 to 1686, who was the author of the classic Exposition of the Creed (1659). Pearson was a learned establishment figure of the Restoration era, who was successively Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University; master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and finally bishop of Chester. He served as chaplain to Charles II and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1667. His Exposition of the Creed, often cited as a model of classical Anglican divinity, exercised a calming influence during a period of theological turbulence and helped to shape the religious consensus that emerged within England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The great essayist Samuel Johnson (1709–84) spoke highly of Pearson’s work and commended it as a model of persuasive, generous orthodoxy.
Yet my topic here is not Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed itself. Instead, I shall use it as a point of departure for a discussion of the place of creeds in the Christian life, and especially the discipleship of the mind. As Pearson rightly saw, the purpose of creeds was to offer the following benefits:
Let’s set the scene for our discussion. In 1930, the celebrity author Evelyn Waugh (1903–66)—whose novel Vile Bodies had been hailed earlier that year as “the ultramodern novel”—dropped a bombshell in literary circles by announcing that he had been received into the Catholic Church. The development was so unexpected and significant that it immediately made the front pages of one of Britain’s leading newspapers, the Daily Express. How, its editor wondered, could an author best known for his “almost passionate adherence to the ultramodern” have embraced the Christian faith? For the next week, the paper’s columns were filled with comment and reflection on this seemingly baffling development.
Waugh spoke of his delight in discovering this new way of engaging reality in a letter he wrote to his friend Edward Sackville-West in 1949: “Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.” There are two points that Waugh makes here, and both are highly relevant to my theme. First, faith removes distortions; it lets us see things as they really are. The New Testament uses a wide range of images, such as illumination or the removal of an obscuring veil, to describe this transformation in the way in which we see ourselves, our world, and God. Second, Waugh speaks of “the delicious process of exploring [the Christian world] limitlessly.” The creeds may offer us a snapshot of this vast landscape, but this is no substitute for inhabiting it and learning more about it firsthand. We can easily look admiringly at a photograph of the Alps, an African savannah, or a South Pacific coral island, but no photograph can hope to do justice to these evocative features of the natural world. We need to experience each of them and explore them for ourselves. The best theology arises from an extended intellectual habitation of the Christian faith.
The creeds are basically guidebooks to the landscape of faith. They map out the territory of the Christian faith and set an agenda for exploration and discovery. So what form of exploration are we talking about? The American novelist Henry Miller once said that “one’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.” The Christian faith is like a lens that brings our world and our lives into focus, letting us look at things in a new way and see them more clearly as we journey through life. Even that journey itself is seen in a new way, allowing us to think of it as progress toward a goal rather than aimless meandering.
Christianity is thus, at least in part, about a transformed imaginative beholding of our world that allows us to see it as it really is rather than imprisoning us within a self-constructed world of delusion, no matter how consoling this might be. The creeds provide us with a framework of meaning that allows and enables us to look at things we are familiar with, yet see them in a new light as we come to realize their true importance and value.
Now while this is an important point, it is also a very abstract point that clearly needs an illustration if it is to be properly grasped. So let me tell you the true story of a mysterious stone carving found in Canford School, in the southern English county of Dorset, which I had the pleasure of visiting recently. This school was founded in 1923 when Canford Manor, an old country house, was purchased and renovated for educational use. The house had previously been owned by a relative of Sir Henry Layard (1818–94), a prominent Victorian archaeologist who had spent much of his time excavating ancient sites in Mesopotamia and was credited with the discovery of the lost Assyrian city of Nineveh in 1845. Layard brought back a huge collection of Assyrian artifacts to England, most of which were installed at Canford Manor. After the First World War, many of these ended up in the British Museum in London or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In 1992, John M. Russell, a professor of art history at Columbia University who was researching a book about Layard, visited Canford School. While exploring the school, he noticed a carved stone panel in the school’s “tuck shop” (canteen). Like everyone else, he assumed that this was simply a modern cast of an ancient Assyrian carving. It had been painted with white emulsion paint. After a visit to the British Museum in London, he realized that it was actually a genuine three-thousand-year-old carved panel that Layard had brought back to England from the throne room of the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). It was sold at auction in London in June 1994 for a record $11.8 million.
So what happened here? Did the stone panel itself change in order to acquire this value? No. Russell recognized it for what it really was. The key point is that the stone was seen with new eyes. Russell displayed what the philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99) called “attentiveness”—a careful, principled, committed attempt to perceive things as they really are rather than as they merely appear to be. The stone panel was seen in a new light, as Russell realized its true importance and value. The creeds offer us such an interpretative framework, a way of imagining ourselves and our worlds, that allows us to see both as they really are and thus live and act meaningfully.
Let me come back to the idea of the creeds as maps of faith. It’s a helpful idea that ties in nicely with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of religious belief as “passionately committing oneself to a system of coordinates.” As every explorer will tell you, a good map is essential to help you get your bearings. Whether you are exploring a new land or trying to find your way home, the map will help you (if you know how to read it). A map shows you the big picture of the landscape, so you can work out where you are or what you’re looking for. In the same way, the creeds give us a map of the Christian faith, so that we can explore it more fully.
Now I need to emphasize something that is very obvious but is too easily overlooked. Imagine somewhere special you’ve visited—perhaps a Caribbean island, an Umbrian landscape, or the mountains and forests of California. Can you remember what it was like to experience their natural beauty? Now imagine this same special place as it is depicted on a map. How does that two-dimensional representation compare with the three-dimensional reality? Not very well! A map cannot even begin to convey the vibrant colors, rich textures, and subtle fragrances of a glorious landscape. It cannot tell us what it is like to live there. Nor is a mere diagram on a piece of paper going to do justice to the beauty and majesty of the natural world. But it’s not meant to.
Maps are just a reduced representation of a greater reality, a technical sketch of something vaster and more interesting. In a similar way, the creeds are a witness to faith and a convenient outline of the core elements of that faith, but they are not meant to—and they cannot—express the vibrancy, joy, and delight of the Christian faith. They are like fences enclosing the Christian pastureland or signposts telling us where to find water or food.
The words of the creeds never seem up to the serious job of capturing the rich Christian vision of reality in its totality. They seem to offer us a diminished and thin account of faith, and highlight the incapacity of human words to do justice to divine reality. Yet this will come as no surprise to those who reflect on the nature of human language. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out that it was impossible even to convey the aroma of freshly ground coffee in words: “Describe the aroma of coffee. Why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma of coffee and not succeeded?”
The problem is not limited to communicating the smell of coffee. Imagine that you are standing on a mountain ridge in the Alps. Below you, spread out like a tapestry, is a beautiful landscape, stretching into the far distance. Woods, streams, fields, villages are all lit by the gentle radiance of a late afternoon sun. How would you describe this vista to someone back home? There is always going to be a significant imaginative gap between a word and the reality to which it points. You could tell your friend about a wood you saw in the distance from the mountaintop, but the little word “wood” will not capture your evocative memory of a green mass of trees, their dappled leaves shimmering in the sunlight, or your emotional reaction to this scene of beauty. At best, it can help you recover that memory, but it can never transmit it to others.
Yet this is not a fatal problem. It only becomes a real difficulty if we are unwise enough to assume an identity between the words of the creeds and the Christian faith—that is, if Christianity is understood simply as a checklist of verbal statements. Yet the creeds are intended to be seen as signposts, pointing to a greater reality that they cannot capture fully using the appointed means of their signification. The words are our attempts to express and communicate the deeper realities of faith. We must learn to see the creeds as verbal vessels signposting the treasure of the gospel. We need to look at them before moving on in order to look through them.
The map offered by the creeds distills the core themes of the Bible, disclosing a glorious, loving, and righteous God, who creates a world that goes wrong and then acts graciously and wondrously in order to renew and redirect before finally bringing it to its fulfillment. We are an integral part of this story, which discloses our true purpose, meaning, and value—who we are, what is wrong with us, what God proposes to do about this, and what we must do in response.
We must avoid thinking about Christian beliefs as if they were a set of individual, unrelated ideas. They are interconnected, like a spider’s web, held together by the compelling and persuasive vision of reality that is made possible by the gospel. The Christian gospel is a totality that is greater than its individual components. Core themes of the Christian creeds—such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, and the hope of heaven—should not be seen as self-contained, watertight compartments, each of which may be mastered without reference to anything else. We certainly need some manageable way of exploring the Christian faith. Yet this does not mean that we should think of Christianity as consisting of a series of individual, disconnected boxes, each of the contents of which may be inspected at any time without our needing to see what is contained in the others.
Let’s change the analogy to help make this point clearer. Imagine that you are standing on a peak in the Swiss Alps or a hill in the Lake District. Below you, you see a breathtaking landscape. Wanting to capture its beauty and grandeur, you take snapshots of the individual elements of this landscape—rivers, villages, forests, and streams. Now imagine someone coming along with a much better camera than yours and taking a panoramic shot of the entire landscape. That person can capture the “big picture,” of which your individual snapshots are parts. The panorama allows each of the snapshots to be fitted into the grander vision of the landscape, but on their own, your snapshots cannot disclose the panorama.
To make sense of the snapshots, we need to see how they fit into the panorama. Now there is nothing wrong with snapshots, which often provide welcome details of complex landscapes. Yet there is a risk that we will only see the snapshots and fail to see the bigger picture of which they are parts—but only parts. Too often we think of Christianity as a disconnected series of doctrinal statements and fail to join up the dots to grasp the bigger picture that they disclose. Yet, to understand individual Christian beliefs, we must first catch the greater vision of reality of which they are parts.
In thinking about any aspect of Christian belief—such as the doctrine of creation—we are really looking at one node of the web of faith or a single snapshot of the greater panorama of the gospel. To study any single Christian belief is actually to study the whole web of faith, the “grand narrative” of the gospel, as it intersects at this node or as it focuses on this theme. The image of a map helps us to realize how all the core beliefs of Christianity are woven together into an interconnected whole. The creeds are maps that help us to understand how ideas interconnect—just as maps show us how towns and cities are linked together by roads.
Let’s remain with the image of the landscape for a moment longer, as there is another point that we need to consider. As we try to take in the vast, rich, and beautiful panorama that lies below us, most of us will find ourselves concentrating on one element of the vista that captures our attention, filtering out the rest. We may focus on a village in the distance, filtering out streams, pastures, and forests as we concentrate on this single facet of the panorama. This “selective attention” or “cognitive bias” is helpful in some ways. It allows us to focus on what we think really matters. Yet, all too often, it also means that we miss out on other aspects of that “big picture”—aspects that matter to other people and should probably matter to us as well.
That’s why the community of faith matters. Imagine that you are joined by a group of friends as you look at the panorama. As you start talking to each other about what you see, it becomes clear that others have noticed things you missed. Where your attention focused on the village, others were fascinated by the iridescent rippling of a fast-flowing stream or the bucolic delight of some cattle finding shade under a tree from the hot afternoon sun. As you talk about what each of you saw, a communal view of the landscape emerges that is far more comprehensive and reliable than any individual account of it. Not only will a group see more than any single individual; a group may also correct an individual’s account of the landscape of faith. What one person thought was a stream running through a wood might actually turn out to be a trail. We need a cumulative, comprehensive, and critical account of faith rather than being limited to one individual’s often very subjective perception of things.
This reminds us that we should see the church as a community of learning, the wisdom and insights of that community transcending those of any one individual. Others who are journeying through the landscape of faith can help us as we travel with them, yet it is not only those around us who can help us. Those who have made the journey of faith before us can also help us as we undertake the same pilgrimage. They asked the same questions we ask, and their answers can encourage us as we wrestle today. As the great medieval theologian John of Salisbury remarked, “We are sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they were, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
And that’s what the creeds aim to do. The creeds are not personal statements of faith but, rather, are public statements of the faith of the Christian church that emerged within early communities of faith as they reflected on their rich heritage and sought to express this as succinctly as possible. The creeds sum up the Christian community’s extended reflections on how best to make sense of the Bible and weave its multiple threads together to give the most satisfactory and authentic account of faith. None of those threads on its own would be adequate to disclose the greater picture of which it is a constituent part. As Cyril of Jerusalem pointed out in the fourth century, the creeds are essentially a “synthesis of faith” that set out the “teaching of the faith in its totality” by gathering together the core themes of the Bible and weaving them into a coherent whole.
Some will still want to question the value of creeds in relation to Christian discipleship. For example, consider the calling of Peter and Andrew, the fishermen that Christ encountered on the shores of Lake Galilee (Mark 1:16–18). Christ speaks these simple words to them: “Come, follow me.” They are not asked to accept—or recite—a creed; they are invited to follow him. The first disciples leave behind their nets—on which they depend completely to make a living—and follow this strange figure. They choose to entrust themselves totally to him, discerning that he is someone truly special.
So if the heart of faith is about entrusting ourselves to Jesus Christ, why make it more complicated by using creeds? Do we really need these uninviting verbalizations of faith, which often seem rather dull and wooden? These are perfectly reasonable questions. Yet we need to appreciate that, although Peter’s and Andrew’s journeys of faith may be said to have begun on the shores of Lake Galilee, they certainly did not end there. As we read the Gospels, we recognize that the disciples’ faith deepens, both in terms of its intensity and its substance, as they gradually come to understand more about the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth and respond to him accordingly.
To begin with, Peter and Andrew trust Christ; as time passes, this personal trust is supplemented—but is never displaced—by beliefs about him. How did Christ fit into the story of Israel? What was so special about this person? What were the implications of following him? How did he fit into their own personal stories? Answering these questions leads to the emergence of a creed. Personal trust is enriched by a framework of beliefs. Jesus Christ stands at the center of a jigsaw puzzle. The rest of the pieces are put in place around him.
Whenever the disciples had to explain who Jesus Christ was or why he was so important, they found themselves having to use words to express their beliefs about him. The creeds are a network of carefully chosen words that the early church agreed on to try to capture what lay at the heart of the Christian faith, as a hedge encloses a pasture. They describe the Christian faith, as a sketch map describes a landscape.
The creeds are statements of faith. Christian writers down the ages have distinguished two senses of this important word “faith.” First, it can be understood as “a faith by which we believe”—that is to say, the act of trust and assent that says yes to God and reaches out to hold fast to God as the secure ground of life and thought. Second, it can be understood as a “faith we believe”—that is to say, a set of beliefs. In this sense of the word, “faith” refers to the content of what we believe rather than the act of believing and trusting. Although these two ways of understanding the word “faith” are inseparable, in that they are like two sides of the same coin, it is nevertheless helpful to distinguish between them. Creeds relate mainly to faith in the second sense of the word—but they nevertheless presuppose faith in the first sense.
We could thus make a distinction between “faith” (which is about relationships: “Whom do I trust?”) and “belief” (which is about ideas: “What do I think?”). Using this framework, creeds are mainly about belief. Faith primarily describes a personal act of trust, a relationship with God, that is characterized by confidence, commitment, and love. To have faith in God is to place one’s trust in God, believing that God is worthy of that trust. Beliefs represent an attempt to put the substance of that faith into words—in effect, explaining what it is about God that causes us to respond in an attitude of trust.
Now these creedal formulations may be secondary to the primary act of trust and commitment, but that does not mean they are unimportant or dispensable. The relationship between the believer and God, expressed in prayer and worship, calls out to be explored in words and ideas. Part of the life of faith is a desire to understand more about who and what we trust. The medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033−1109) famously expressed this point in his slogan fides quarens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”
Let me now pick up on a phrase I used earlier, which needs to be explored in more detail. I suggested that we need to learn to see through the creeds. What did I mean by that? I have taught theology for many years at Oxford University and have learned that there are three main questions we should ask about any doctrine of the Christian faith—such as the Trinity. First, we ask why this doctrine is to be believed—in other words, What are the reasons for thinking that this is justified and trustworthy? Second, we move on to ask how this doctrine might be taught or preached. What analogies might we use to help make sense of it? Third, we ask a deeper question. If this doctrine is indeed right, what difference does it make to the way we understand ourselves and our world? How does it shape the way in which we live?
It is this third question that I want to consider in more detail now. Christian discipleship is about reflective inhabitation of our faith. Christianity gives us a lens through which we can see ourselves and our world for what they really are. One of the finest statements of this principle is found in the poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633), especially in these lines:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
Herbert was writing in the early seventeenth century, when two inventions that made use of lenses—often referred to as “glasses” at that time—were transforming human appreciation of the natural world. He draws a clear distinction between the different modes of viewing these allow: looking at and looking through. You can look at a microscope or a telescope. Alternatively, you can look through them and find yourself in a new world.
In Herbert’s day, the microscope allowed a new wealth of detail to be seen in the petals of flowers and the wings of butterflies, while the telescope revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter and the mass of stars that make up the Milky Way. Both instruments allowed people to view things that had always been there but previously had not been visible because they lay beyond the frontiers of human vision. We could not see them because our eyes were not good enough. An expansion of vision was needed to open up these new worlds.
Herbert’s comments, however, are primarily about theology and concern the purpose and place of Christian beliefs. He helps us to understand that we can approach beliefs in two ways. First, we can look at them—an approach found in many traditional textbooks of theology, which set out each individual Christian doctrine and allow its distinct themes to be appreciated. Second, we can look through them, as if they were a telescope enabling us to “the heav’n espy,” and enjoy an enriched view of reality, resulting from a heightened ability to discern what is really there.
Embracing Christianity’s “bigger picture” helps us to realize that each of us, being created in God’s image, matters profoundly; and that status and wealth mean nothing compared to the riches of knowing God. As Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471) pointed out in his spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ, when seen in a right perspective, “the glory of the world fades away.” We see things from a new perspective and come to realize that this is not just a different way of looking at our world—it is a faithful and critical account of the way the world really is. Christian discipleship involves reflecting on the new world that is opened up as we look through the creeds at the world and ourselves, and come to see them in a new way.
Yet we need to appreciate that some people choose to keep seeing the world using a distorting mirror or turn a blind eye toward the darker side of human nature. The philosopher Iris Murdoch often pointed out that human beings find reality somewhat uncomfortable and prefer to invent ways of looking at their world and themselves that are less disturbing to them. Looking at things through a Christian lens, however, brings our true situation into focus, enabling us to realize that we cannot go on as we are. To use a medical analogy, the Christian framework of meaning acts as a diagnostic tool, showing us that something is wrong with us and telling us the treatment required if we are to be cured. We are liberated from the delusion that all is well and shown what needs to be done if things are to be put right.
Let me conclude by asking a practical question. How can we use the creeds to develop our own personal faith, in terms of both its breadth and depth? One important way is to see the creeds as mapping the landscape of faith, and inviting us to explore it, in the full knowledge that there are parts of the landscape that remain unfamiliar to us. I see the creeds as inviting me to explore what I have not yet encountered and affirm what I have not yet understood. The creeds are aspirational, in that they set out a vision that they invite us to share, even though many of us are still exploring individual aspects of that vision.
At its best, Christian theology can do three things, all of which are the natural and proper outcomes of reflecting on the creeds. Let me note these briefly.
The Spanish writer Teresa of Ávila’s landmark work The Interior Castle of the Soul (1577) suggests that we think of faith as the exploration of a castle. Having been granted access, we yearn (and are meant to yearn) to explore the castle’s inner courtyards, one by one. Teresa insists that we must be careful never to limit the Christian vision of reality to that which we have personally experienced, understood, or grasped. Others, past and present, urge us to go further and deeper, opening up other rooms in the “castle of the soul” as we explore the “boundless riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8). We are to be caught up in the reflective inhabitation of something that is greater and more wonderful than we initially realize.
Reciting the creeds is thus about both affirming what we have already discovered and come to trust, and setting an agenda for the enlargement of our appreciation of God and Christ. It reminds us of both what we know and what we need to discover. The creeds might not offer us a definitive account of the “boundless riches of Christ,” but they provide a framework for discovering and appreciating these, as part of the ongoing process of Christian discipleship. May that journey of exploration continue!
This chapter is based on a lecture given to the Chester Theological Society in Chester Cathedral on May 11, 2011.