Not every chapter in this guidebook will comment on popular memes, but this chapter does. This excerpt from Robin R. Meyers has been making the rounds, and it encapsulates in very brief form a general progressive critique of contemporary Christianity.
The basic outlines of this framing are straightforward: there was a more original impulse in Christianity, centered in Jesus and his teaching, that was about how to live. Unfortunately, over time, this was co-opted by a religious structure and turned into a doctrine about Jesus as a divine person.
Often this critique is articulated in the distinction between the gospels and Paul, that Jesus was focused on a way of living whereas Paul was focused on faithfulness to Jesus as Christ. Other times this critique is focused on the rise of Christendom and the problems with Constantine, with Constantine turning Christianity into the state’s religion (the most popular and widely read version of this can be found in John Brown’s The Da Vinci Code).
So here’s the moment when I tell you I think this whole line of argumentation is misguided. Now admittedly, some parts of this thesis are attractive. Like Robin R. Meyers, I have a “high view” of the Sermon on the Mount. And I do think some versions of Christianity hyper-focus on accepting “beliefs” about Jesus to the exclusion of taking Jesus as a moral exemplar.
My problems with the thesis have much more to do with it being historically inaccurate and a poor form of genre criticism. Let me take each of those in turn.
Regarding historical accuracy: even during the historical period when the gospels were being written, Christian communities were concerned both with the content of Jesus’ teaching and with his status as Son of God. That is to say, a developing doctrine of Jesus as a member of the Trinity is present in the gospels just as much as report about his teachings.
So too at the time the Nicene Creed is getting worked out. Yes, the church was working out a very precise doctrinal creed about who it wanted to say Jesus was and the Trinity was more generally, but it did so at the same time that all those same bishops and theologians were regularly reflecting in their preaching and teaching also on the life of Jesus as a model for Christian living.
The problem with genre criticism: The Sermon On the Mount isn’t a creed, it’s the report of a sermon contained in a larger text called a gospel. The Nicene Creed isn’t a guide to living, it’s a creed hammered out in a gathering of church leaders and theologians in order to come to a unified sense of who they all said together God was as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In other words, it’s just not a fair comparison, because the person writing Matthew had one goal in mind in what they were writing and the creed writers had another. Both are single moments within the wider authorship of these people. Neither text totally encapsulates the whole of what they were about.
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So here is my counter-thesis. I don’t think the problem lies in the difference between what Matthew was writing in the 70s or 80s A.D. and what the authors of the Nicene Creed were writing in the third century. To me that’s a facile and actually false distinction that ends up not being fair or helpful.
Instead, I think the problem, inasmuch as there is one, lies first in liturgical usage, and second in a more subtle reframing of how we think about the authority of teachers. I’ll take each of these in turn.
On Liturgical Usage: I think a large part of our problem, which actually can be easily rectified and I plan to work on this in our own liturgical context, is that at least in “liturgical” churches, which many if not most progressive churches are, we have a tradition of reciting the creeds but we don’t have a tradition of reciting the Sermon On the Mount.
I’ve pondered this for a while as a pastor but habit has always meant I’ve not tacked against the wind much, but it’s intriguing that, for example, in our Lutheran tradition we recite many aspects of our catechism in worship (the creed, the Lord’s Prayer) but we don’t recite the Ten Commandments (also contained in the catechism). Why is this? I guess historically churches have recognized the importance and centrality of the Ten Commandments but never made it liturgical practice to recite them.
This ends up giving the impression in worship that there is more of a focus on naming God than there is on pondering God’s commands. However, this is not the fault of the author of the creeds or the author of the commandments, it’s really the fault of liturgical planners and how liturgy is constructed.
So on this point, I think the insight we can gain from Robin R. Meyers is not so much a denigration of third century Christianity and more an invitation to reform how we worship. What we might consider doing is to bring into Christian worship more of the historically canonical texts that help us center the question: how then shall we live?
Top of mind for these kinds of texts would be the Beatitudes, or the prayer of St. Francis, or the Ten Commandments, but also instructive and fascinating, Dorothee Sølle’s Credo (which I’ve included at the bottom of this post because of it’s length). Faith communities might also consider simply re-writing the creed (many already do this) and include in it more content from Jesus’ life and teaching and perhaps also the women disciples and/or the life of Israel with God. An example in the last century of this happening in another tradition was the Roman Catholic addition in 2002 of the Luminous Mysteries to the praying of the Rosary.
My invitation to readers in this point is to reconsider the assumed superiority Robin R. Meyers and others perhaps unintentionally move us toward when we come to the conclusion that somehow the third century Christians co-opted an original and purer form of Christianity. I don’t think that’s a helpful thesis. The point is to focus on our own practice, and to keep in mind every era of faith requires in our moment reform and refocusing.
On the Authority of Teachers: But the other and perhaps more subtle theological issue in all of this has to do indeed with the Sermon on the Mount vs. the Nicene Creed. I’d ask, are they really so separate and different. And I’d answer: No.
Take for example a comparison between the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. and a biography about MLK Jr. We can’t really argue that somehow the dream speech is more pure and original, and the biography too focused on MLK Jr.’s life. Instead, we know the “I Have a Dream” sermon has secular power because of who MLK Jr. had become within our culture at that time, and any biography written about him is now written at least in part because of the power of his preaching and leadership and also as continuing reflection on his authority as a preacher and organizer.
In other words, the content of preaching and the authority of the preacher go hand in hand. This is an insight that goes back as far as Aristotle in his distinctions between ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is about the authority of the speaker, logos is the word itself, and pathos is the role of an audience itself.
So, in our original examples, it’s clear the Sermon On the Mount is the logos. It’s the word itself, the text of the argument. The Nicene Creed is a post-facto articulation of the ethos, attempting to establish the authority of the speaker (Jesus) who spoke things like the Sermon On the Mount.
Finally, the real issue in all of this then is the pathos: as an audience, how do we hear and feel about the authority of the speaker and the word the speaker has spoken. I myself, and I say this as a progressive Christian, believe the unique thing about Jesus Christ is that his word and his identity are one and the same. I have absolutely no problems confessing the full Nicene Creed anymore than I have any problems recognizing the full authority of the Sermon On the Mount, because I believe his authority comes from who he is because he is and modeled the words he spoke. All the creed does (which of course is a lot) is articulate in short form who he is in relationship to God.
Now, having written all of this, we’re left with you as the reader deciding whether or not I’ve made a reasonable argument (logos), whether you trust me as the one to say such things (ethos), and then whether such an argument can sway you given where you are in reflecting on these things (pathos).
Now, have fun with Dorothee Sølle’s Credo, which I’ll circle back around to tomorrow when I write about progressive worship.
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CREDO
I believe in God
who created the world not ready made
like a thing that must forever stay what it is who does not govern according to eternal laws that have perpetual validity
nor according to natural orders
of poor and rich,
experts and ignoramuses,
people who dominate and people subjected.
I believe in God
who desires the counter-argument of the living and the alteration of every condition
through our work
through our politics.
I believe in Jesus Christ
who was right when he
“as an individual who can’t do anything” just like us
worked to alter every condition
and came to grief in so doing
Looking to him I discern
how our intelligence is crippled,
our imagination suffocates,
and our exertion is in vain
because we do not live as he did
Every day I am afraid
that he died for nothing
because he is buried in our churches, because we have betrayed his revolution in our obedience to and fear
of the authorities.
I believe in Jesus Christ
who is resurrected into our life
so that we shall be free
from prejudice and presumptuousness from fear and hate
and push his revolution onward
and toward his reign
I believe in the Spirit
who came into the world with Jesus,
in the communion of all peoples
and our responsibility for what will become of our earth: a valley of tears, hunger, and violence
or the city of God.
I believe in the just peace
that can be created,
in the possibility of meaningful life
for all humankind,
in the future of this world of God.
Amen