After re-reading my last post on the Creed and debating it a bit with atheist Jack Shifflett (see comments to that post), I think some additional thoughts/qualifications are in order. Thus we begin a four-part series on the Creed subtitled “mostly what I said was wrong and yet I’m going to stubbornly defend it anyway.” It’s actually a great American sport, that. Enjoy!
(1) In my original post, I argued that the purpose of the Creeds was to provide a kind of borderland for accurate thinking about God. I still think that’s true, but I knew when I wrote it that in some sense it only applies to parts of the Creed that discuss God’s traits at some abstract level (or have direct abstract implications). Since most of the Creed is not a list of abstract traits about God but instead tells a historical story in rather concrete terms, you could reasonably argue that the Creed really doesn’t do a very good job of the purpose I set out for it. And in a sense you’d be right. If the point of the Creed is to help us understand God’s characteristics, then isn’t it a little bit odd that it doesn’t spend very much time giving us a list of God’s traits?
I was aware of this tension when I wrote the original piece. And I’m saying all of this now to say: I have argued before that Christianity is more of a story than a set of abstract statements, and I meant it when I said it then and I still mean it now. I’m not going back on that. I can’t reasonably go back on it anyway, because it is obviously true. So I know the Creed serves other purposes than the one I set out (e.g., summarizing Christian belief in a tidy, easy-to-digest way); and, though I think providing a borderland of right thinking about God is one of those purposes, it is a much narrower and less pervasive purpose than my original post implied.
Therefore it gets low estimated buy sildenafil australia for each man from any financial setting to get a dissolvable for their inconvenience in a pocket good way. viagra 25 mg Serotonin and norepinephrince both the neurotransmitters involved in the process. In short, due to shortage buy viagra in canada supply of blood to the genitals during sexual arousal. So, one can enjoy long-lasting physical act for getting young-aged passion back on the online viagra mastercard Click Here track.
(2) Although it may have sounded like it (curse my tendency to hyperbole!), I never meant to suggest that the Creed was the only thing that mattered in Christianity — that prayer, and Christian community, and reading the Bible, and obedience to Jesus’ teachings, don’t matter at all. Obviously they do. I think the Creed accurately captures the essence of Christian belief, and I think that’s very useful and has a lot of practical value (including the one I mentioned in my original article). But someone who believes the “Creed” but doesn’t make any effort to do these other things would hardly be “Christian” at all in any meaningful sense. Christianity is primarily about a relationship with a Person, and not just a particular set of beliefs. The beliefs exist to help the relationship, but though you can’t have a good relationship without right beliefs, it is also equally possible to have right beliefs but no relationship. I may accurately believe that Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary atheist who says mean things about Christianity and seems like a pompous windbag, but I don’t know him. I’ve never met him or talked with him or shared a carriage ride through the English countryside in Spring with him.
So my original post clearly made the Creed out to be more of all that than it actually is. In the remaining articles in this series, we will cover similar questions like: Did God hang the fate of the universe on the Nicene bishops who wrote the Creed? Can you be a Christian and disbelieve parts of the Creed? Does the Creed include all the important parts of Christian doctrine? Should it bother anyone that more than one Christian Creed exists? Does God really care about His own “homooúsios” (yes, I’m serious – we are actually covering that exact question)? Can we throw the book of Leviticus out of the Bible? If we did, would it matter how far we threw it? And so on.
I have nothing useful to say, but it did occur to me that “I Used Hyperbole (And Hyperbole Won)” would be a good song parody. I also wanted to ask if believing in a creed makes one, by definition, “credulous,” but I suspect I already know your answer to that.
I almost never have anything useful to say, but as you can easily see, it hasn’t stopped me yet!
(1) About the song title: Hahahaha! I’ll have to work with that one and see what I can come up with. That title somehow perfectly defines my writing style.
(2) About credulous: Yep, I imagine that you do know my answer and could probably write it word-for-word! Still, I hadn’t made the connection between the two words before; I wonder if they actually have the same root? Here’s the definition of credulous I found:
“1. Disposed to believe too readily; gullible.”
I suppose you know I would argue that (1) a creed is just as likely to protect you from being gullible as it is to cause you to be gullible, that (2) the degree to which it does one versus the other depends on the kind of creed you hold, (3) everyone has a creed of some kind regardless of whether they say they do or not, (4) creeds in a sense ought to be the result of a search for evidence and thus no one should believe any creed “too readily,” and (5) a creed that is based in truth would necessarily make one less gullible, just like an understanding of physics might make one less likely to be “taken in” by a magician.
Obviously, each of those wild assertions is in need of pages of defense; and none of them directly argues for the truth of the Christian creed; but I do think they are at least partially defensible. I think the idea that a creed or dogma is associated with gullibility (which, in all seriousness, it is, wordplays aside) is a common misconception that is worth some discussion. My only defense for this set of wild (undefended) assertions is that you practically dared me! : )
Thanks for the comments, Jack, keep them coming!