Professor Walter Shurden has commented recently on the diverse dangers arising for what he terms the “historical amnesia” of the Baptist people.
Foremost among these dangers he places the movement “from a Christ-centered to a creed-centered faith.” The substitution of which he speaks means, I suppose, the abandonment of a vital experiential faith for a structured recital of theological propositions. These propositions would presumably be used to enforce some rigid orthodoxy.
Now I would agree that historical amnesia is one of the greatest dangers faced by today's Baptists — and by most other Christians, by the way. Where I find myself in profound disagreement with Dr. Shurden is his location of danger in the creeds. The creeds are our surest defense against the very historical amnesia that threatens us.
Credo means “I believe.” A creed is another word for a belief. Even the cliché “no creed but the Bible” is, on reflection, a creed. The tricky part is the meaning of the personal pronoun “I.” The questions behind the question is how the “I” gets to be the “I.” It is a question, in other words, of how the person is formed.
Growing up, one of the “rules” in our family was that the last person to the supper table had to say the blessing. Not only that, but the last one also had to read a Bible verse printed on a card that we drew from a ceramic bread loaf. Typically my brothers and I pushed and raced each other to the table to avoid having to perform these duties.
As kids, we often fought or joked about these rituals but my mother took them with absolute seriousness. She would occasionally even “tear up” when a particular Bible verse hit home, making all of us feel rather embarrassed. At the same time, as silly and irreverent as we sometimes acted, we learned that the practices of prayer and Bible reading are vitally important.
But more than just “Bible as information,” we came to recognize (through both our parents and our church) that to live in the place and time God put us is to live in that place and time in biblical terms. The words of Scripture are for us. We are Israel in the wilderness waiting for God's manna. We are the disciples afraid of the storm and the waves. Jesus is our Savior come to calm the waters. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is still given to us today. This story is our story. Such formation gave us a lens through which to see and understand the biblical story. It called forth certain beliefs embodied in a way of life.
The historic creeds, while they certainly do not replace Scripture, are a way of shaping this lens. In 2005, in fact, the Baptist World Alliance recited the Apostle's Creed as it had done at its beginning one hundred years earlier. The first president of BWA, Alexander Maclaren, in his address to the assembly, proposed that their very first act be an affirmation of the historic Christian faith through saying the creed. He rightly saw that saying the Apostle's Creed is not antithetical to being Christ-centered.
Understood fully, tradition involves both a knowing what and a knowing how. One can know the rules of the game of tennis (the what), but if you don't know how to play, then you haven't fully entered into the tradition of tennis. If I don't know how to practice the what, then I can't really play.
Similarly, one can know what is in Scripture, what the verses say, and so forth. But if the person doesn't know how to relate Scripture to a larger pattern or story such that it shapes a way of life, then the person will have difficulty living the gospel.
This might seem so obvious that it goes without saying. However, as most of us realize, “knowing how” to read Scripture is an ongoing challenge. Is the Trinity in Scripture? What about original sin? Is creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) there? Does Scripture portray Christ as fully divine? One could (and some of my students have) answered all of these questions in the negative. So for example, while Triune formulas are in Scripture, the fuller understanding of the Trinity is dependent upon the church councils and creeds.
Tradition is that compact, in the terminology of Edmund Burke, between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. Such traditions, embodied in the classic creeds, are gifts that help us remember.
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]