I saw in my comments section yesterday that Elizabeth’s Little Blog has posted a response to a post I made, “Christianity without Christ,” about a year and a half ago.
Elizabeth correctly points out that there have been multiple Christianities over the years, a fact that scholars have been pointing out especially over the last decade. But there are Christianities and there is Christianity™. One is in charge, the others are not. This also is a fact.
Probably the preeminent measures of Christianity™ are the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creeds. For centuries, these two confessions have defined Christianity, and they will continue to do so for centuries. The overwhelming majority of Christians over the centuries agree, a number I guess is well over ninety percent.
It is simply a descriptively true fact that heretical Christians are not Christians™.
I have long suspected a certain deviousness in the current vanguards of heretical pop Christianity, your John Shelby Spongs and your Jesus Seminarians. (Marcus Borg seems a notable exception.) It as if they say, “Ha ha! So I have unmasked your orthodox Jesus! He is not who you thought he was after all! And I knew it all along!” It is a Scooby Doo approach to liberal religion.
What recent religious scholarship on the history of Christianities has shown is that we Unitarian Universalists are not the only losers of the Christian game. We already knew our fellow losers were out there. Now we know more about them. Yet Christianity™ remains nonplussed.
How many folks are there in liberal, mainline Christian congregations who have little to no interest—even an aversion—to reciting, honestly, the Apostles and Nicene Creeds? They are secret, reluctant heretics.
Jesus is their Great Teacher and Moral Exemplar, even their Guru and Avatar. But he is not their Christ in any way that the vast, vast majority of Christians™ would recognize. They are not the first off-brand Christians to believe this, to be sure. They have good reasons to believe they have a truer, more authentic Jesus than Christianity™. But they are still off-brand Christians. It is as though they expect the Christian™ powers-that-be to exclaim in frustration, “And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you crazy kids!”
The root meaning of “heretic” is “one who chooses.” It carries the connotation of “splitter,” one who knowingly diverges from Christianity™ in spite of opposition because they believe their version of Christianity is better. There is a certain moral courage needed to be a good heretic.
It’s too easy to say that all Christianities are equal, but some Christianities, because they won, are more equal than the others. They are the Christianities that ran the Council of Nicea and the Inquisition. They are the Christianities that killed the Cathars and Michael Servetus and so many others. It’s a game, but it’s a killing game.
This fact isn’t nice, and it doesn’t sit well with us religious liberals with religious freedom in Western democracies, where we don’t have to worry about these things. But the consequences of religious difference are still deadly in many parts of the world today. Someday they might be deadly here too. I hope we heretics will have more courage then than we do now.
I tend to agree with Elizabeth. As I understand what you are saying, societal power structures are the ultimate arbiters of our religious identities. I can be a follower of Jesus, but I cannot authentically identify as Christian if I don’t conform to the parameters defined by the dominant group. Somehow I have a hard time seeing Jesus agreeing with your restrictive view. Peace :)
Chut, (can I call you that?)
Having read your response, and then the response of Elizabeth, and then your comments on Elizabeth’s page… (whew)
How about this: While there never has been a “normative” Christianity (despite the ardent attempts of creeds and some historians to create/impose one or another), we can recognize the (ongoing) discussion of “What it means to be Christian” as heavily influenced (bounded?) by the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds. However, the Creeds have been around so long and, particularly in our charged theo-political climate today, have gained several layers of successive meaning – a history not always teased out or discussed by less-than-Ph.D. candidates-in-the-History-of-Christian-Thought. It seems entirely reasonable to me that the language used in the Creeds (or in the translations) can gain a life of its own, and therefore someone’s hesitancy to use this or that title for Jesus, to use this or that phrase echoing the Creed, could be an honest reaction to (popular) culture’s hold on our language (and resulting toehold on our ideas).
Frankly, Jesus is too big to limit ourselves to the Creeds. (We must remember that we have diversity preserved in the canon – four gospels and several letters from differing perspectives.) And possibly, God is too big to limit ourselves to “theism.” (I’m just throwing that out there.)
The discussion of what it means to be Christian is important – but I see it today taking much more the shape of how we act, how we are in the world, what we do and how we can transform the world in an encounter with the Reign of God; rather than the arguments of yesteryear over doctrinal statements and creedal qualifications for inclusion in the community.
Just my two cents. Peace.
i have a hard time with creeds. reciting creeds in worship is something that i have chosen not to do. if i say them with any conscious whatsoever, i find myself leaving out lines and changing others. i think that we as christians say the apostles’ and nicean creeds as a mindless chant. we want it to be something that binds us, so we stop analyzing it at that level. if we want it to feel good, we can’t think about it too much.
I don’t by any means want to speak for all UU Christians here on this, despite my job and despite the fact that I’d be laughed out for even attempting to do so, but…it is interesting, though, to have jetissoned the creedal language for so much of my UU 30 plus years, including a lot of that as a Christian among UUs, and then to return to it and find spiritual nurture and kinship there. Sort of like what I did with the Lord’s Prayer 15 plus years ago. Maybe I should replace my daily meditation using the Lord’s Prayer and substitute the Apostles or Nicene Creed for this practice and see where the Spirit churns.
Reminds me too of those great Creedal placards, or whatever you might call them, adorning the sanctuary at Kings Chapel. And something I was taught about the free church doesn’t reject creeds for what they say, maybe, as much as for how they are misused. At least that’s my approach.
You do point to one of the reasons why I find more affinity with Borg than Spong…
Hmmm. Maybe a rereading the creeds for the first time kind of workshop is in the works for UU Christianity 202.
Thanks all for the discussion too.