creed #2: Johnson

Johnson says that the Creed performs five distinct but interrelated functions: It narrates the Christian myth, interprets Scripture, constructs a world, guides Christian practices and prepares the Christian people for worship. Myth, by the way, does not mean untrue. It is language that seeks to express a truth beyond what we can test and prove.

He examines each statement in the Creed in detail, explaining what it means and why Christians believe it. In particular, he is thorough (even exhaustive) in giving all of the scriptural references for each statement. (Readers could exhaust themselves by looking up each reference. Most of us will accept Johnson’s research as accurate.)

Johnson is known for his opposition to the so-called Jesus Seminar and the attempt to discover “the historical Jesus, apart from faith.” As he did in a previous book, The Real Jesus, he points out in several places that a Jesus stripped of divinity is just another human being. Why, he asks, would such a Jesus matter more than Socrates or Confucius or the Buddha?

Johnson steers a middle course between fundamentalists, who take every word of Scripture literally, and progressives, who insist on a “reasonable” Christianity. One battleground between the two forces is the doctrine of the virgin birth. He contends that it is neither possible nor important to know the biology of Jesus’ conception and birth. Rather, what is important is that the incarnation of God’s Son came about through both divine and human agency.

He covers the Catholic Church’s addition of the filioque phrase, a doctrinal matter that still divides the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. He believes the addition was unnecessary.

One of the strongest chapters in this book is Johnson’s examination of the four marks of the Church(chapter 8)—one, holy, catholic and apostolic. These, he contends, describe an ideal that the Church has never realized and will never fully realize. He notes, too, that the term “Roman Catholic” is oxymoronic, combining the element of universality with a highly particular adjective.

After examining the whole Creed, he says, “Everything up to this point has been introduction.” His final chapters try to explain why it matters what Christians believe. It is because Christians offer what they believe to be the truth about the world in every respect. The doctrines expressed in the Creed are not only true to Christians, but true for all. That, he says, is the positive witness the Creed makes to the world.

He also notes the simplicity of the Creed. It consistently affirms what we believe without trying to explain how those things are true. We believe, for example, that God created all things, but the Creed doesn’t tell us how.