The creeds emerged from the gospel’s encounter with a broader cultural context, through missionary expansion. The development of doctrine, as Alister McGrath notes, was “partly on account of the need to interact with a language and a conceptual framework not designed with the specific needs of Christian theology in mind.” Doctrine and creeds arise from the need to explain and defend the gospel message in the face of intellectual and religious challenges, such as polytheism, Gnosticism, or dualism.
It can no longer be taken for granted that Christianity’s historic creeds have enduring significance beyond being mere relics of the past. As we walk among the smoldering ruins of Western Christendom, we’re likely to encounter fragments of these creeds, perhaps even in complete form. They are somewhat familiar, but we feel no organic connection with them.
As evangelical Christians, we believe the creeds. We sometimes recite them to remind ourselves we do. But their power is fading. We may feel embarrassed when we collectively recite them, not because we no longer believe them but because we believe them in a different way.
For many, the creeds are no longer self-evident, together with many other religious beliefs that used to hold society together at its seams. People who reject them no longer strike us as irrational or out of the ordinary. We’ve demoted the creeds to the status of hypotheses.
But against the prevailing cultural winds and despite their contextual nature, the creeds must retain a central position in the church’s life.
Outgrowing the Creeds
Charles Taylor explained the subtle change in our rapport with our own beliefs in terms of what he calls “secularity 3”—a change in the mode of believing. In a global world, it’s almost impossible to hold one’s religious opinions as self-evident. The presence of a bewildering diversity of indigenous theologies, particularly in parts of the world where the church is growing quickly, makes the historic creeds seem small indeed.
A double movement has been slowly rendering the creeds irrelevant.
1. Rise of Historical Consciousness
In the West, the past is no longer seen as a depository of eternal truths but as a merely antiquarian interest. Leopold von Ranke’s famous 1824 statement is relevant here: “To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high office this work does not aspire: it wants only to show what actually happened.” But what actually happened has no direct bearing on eternal and necessary truths of reason, which cannot be supported by history’s contingent truths.
The effect of historicization is captured by Robin G. Collingwood’s comments on Johann Gottfried Herder, the first intellectual to describe historical consciousness: “Herder, as far as I know, was the first thinker to recognize in a systematic way that . . . human nature is not uniform but diversified. Human nature was not a datum but a problem.”
The natural is ultimately temporal—it can only be recognized in time, longitudinally, never just synchronically. Time and history are the photographic developers that reveal natural patterns. Debasing the past leads to questioning one’s sense of what is natural in the same way considering very closely the shape of a word defamiliarizes it, rendering it strange and arbitrary. Slicing time carves out the space in which we discover a huge variety of beliefs. A cross-section of history reveals disparate details without any clear means of relating them.
2. Global Dissipation of Truth
While the longitudinal approach of the historical consciousness detaches nature from the past and makes it a problem instead of a datum, the lateral vision of a globalizing approach relativizes nature to various contexts. Truth becomes local, and while other local truths may be interesting, they’re often of no value outside their original contexts.
This bears directly on the creeds, as African American theologian James Cone indicates: “I respect what happened at Nicea and Chalcedon and the theological input of the Church Fathers on Christology. . . . But the homoousia question is not a black question.”
Cone complains about a uniformizing tendency in Christian theology that’s also recognized by W. A. Dyrness and Oscar Garcia-Johnson: “The inherent problem with ‘Christendom’ was its ability to impose a uniformity that ignored or suppressed alternative points of view. . . . At the very least, it sometimes proposed theological formulations that were difficult to put into other cultural frameworks, where, for example, there had been no previous conversations about ‘persons’ and ‘substance.’”
To the extent creeds operate with so-called metaphysical language—and some creeds are more metaphysical than others (e.g., compare the Apostles’ Creed with Chalcedon or the Athanasian Creed)—they’re less interesting outside their original contexts. Each context, both across history and across the globe, presents unique challenges and questions.