Showing posts with label creed. Show all posts

Anglican priest Ralph McMichael is director of the Center for the Eucharist in St Louis, Missouri.  He is the author of Eucharist:  A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark International 2010).  This is an excellent overview of eucharistic practice and theology from a very catholic and sacramental perspective.  Chapter 5 analyses the sequence of actions that comprise the eucharistic celebration (in the Western church), including the significance of the congregational recitation of the Nicene Creed.

The excerpt is found on pp 115-116.


Two types of confession characterize the Eucharistic life.  The first type is associated with the recitation of the Nicene Creed, and the second type is associated with the confession of sins...One type of confession is the act of adhering to a statement or set of beliefs preceding  the confessors.  There are statements of belief, truth, and meaning that one recites as a way of submitting to them.  Confession is not a sharing of opinion, and the corporate act of confession is not an aggregate of opinion.  In fact, agreement with content is not the essence of the confession; it is not an expression of what we think.  It is to submit to the boundaries of belief so that one might learn to live in this new territory.  The content becomes the subject of thought; we are to wrestle with what is said.  The Creed, and whole Eucharist, is the way that we are incorporated into the mind of Christ, which exists as the ecclesial Body of Christ.  The development of Creeds began in a Christian regula fidei, a rule or a way to regulate the faith.  Faith as that which is believed, in contrast to faith by which one believes, is not an amorphous entity requiring our agreement to keep it afloat.  Faith is a regulation of Christian life; it keeps us heading the right way.  The recitation of the Nicene Creed in the Eucharist is directed forward and is not a bit of nostalgia for the old days of certainty.  The Creed is our way to communion...

The common faith recited and received in the Eucharist requires commitment but not consensus.  A theme present in each dimension of the Eucharistic life is that communion is received by the offering self, the offering assembly, and is not an achievement of proper order and thought.  We do not achieve, possess, or produce communion, but we do submit faithfully to its life and demands.  Confessing a common faith is a visible manifestation of a gathering of persons for the purpose of sharing a life given to them.  These gathered, confessing, persons will keep meeting each other within this faithful act, a place to encounter confessors from previous ages and other Eucharistic celebrations within this common faith.

Theologian Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University in The Creed:  what Christians believe and why it matters  (Doubleday 2003)  takes on the issue of the Nicene Creed and its seeming intellectual incoherence to many--both inside and outside the Church--whose worldviews are informed largely by the assumptions of post-Enlightenment modernism.  An excerpt can be found here on the Beliefnet site.

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For Modernity, belief in a creed is a sign of intellectual failure.  Creeds involve faith, and faith  makes statements about reality that can't  be tested.  Everyone knows that statements can be true only when they don't really say anything about the world or when they have been empirically tested.  Creeds are therefore structures of fantasy.  One cannot be both a believer and a critical thinker...To be authentic, people must own each statement they make passionately and personally, and must accept nothing on the basis of outside authority...

My aim is to make the creed controversial for those Christians who say it but do not understand it and therefore do not grasp what a radical and offensive act they perform when they declare these words every week in a public assembly.  In other words, I want to make the creed more controversial rather than less controversial for the right reasons rather than the wrong reasons.

I think that the Christian creed enunciates a powerful and provocative understanding of the world, one that ought to scandalize a world that runs on the accepted truths of Modernity.  There is something in the creed to offend virtually every contemporary sensibility.  At the same time, it communicates a compelling vision of the world's destiny and humanity's role that challenges the accustomed idolatries and the weary platitudes of current worldly wisdom.  Christians who say these words should know what they are doing when they say them and what they are saying when they mean them.  This is the precondition to celebrating a specifically Christian conception of reality, and the presupposition for their challenging the dominant conceptions of the world.

A day late--I'm only half Irish, after all--but here's a small tribute to Patrick (or Padraig, as he was known to his Irish converts, or Patricius, as he was known to his Romano-British family of origin). The icon beautifully melds Celtic and Eastern imagery (Patrick is widely venerated as a saint in the Orthodox church) and his paraphrase of the Nicene Creed will perhaps be a jolt to some of the trendy types who are into Celtic spirituality lite. Two respective tips of the hokey green leprechaun hat to GetReligion and Episcopal Cafe. The creed is found in Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbrian Community (New York, HarperOne 2002).

There is no other God,
there never was and never will be,
than God the Father,
unbegotten and without beginning,
the Word of the Universe,
as we have been taught,
and His Son Jesus Christ
whom we declare to have always been with the Father
in a way that baffles description,
before the beginning of the world,
before all beginning;
and by Him are made all things
visible and invisible.

He was made man, defeated death
and was received into heaven by the Father,
who has given Him power over all names
in heaven, on earth, and under the earth;
and every tongue will acknowledge to Him
that Jesus Christ is the Lord God.
We believe in Him
and we look for His coming soon
as judge of the living and the dead
who will treat everyone according to their deeds.

He has poured out the Holy Spirit upon us in abundance:
the gift and guarantee of eternal life,
who makes those who believe and obey
children of God and joint heirs with Christ.

We acknowledge and adore Him as one God
in the Trinity of the Holy Name.