Creeds and the Trinity.

St Michael’s, Mount Dinham, Exeter,

Trinity Sunday, 2008.

‘They worshipped. But some doubted.’

 + In nomine …

 It’s come to my attention recently that some people find creeds, such as the one we will sing in just a moment, difficult things. I’m glad that this doesn’t seem to be a problem for many, but for some however, these creeds are great weights that trouble them in the middle of the service. Lists of apparently incomprehensible things, written over a thousand years ago, which they’re supposed to believe, but are not quite sure if they do. Just as we read of the disciples in our gospel just now, ‘some doubted’. More than that, some even see them as positively sinister, tools of priestly distortion, control and repression, a la Dan Brown and his Da Vinci Code.

          Now of course creeds can be misused, like anything else. They can become a weapon with which to bully or persecute people, a tool of division. But this is precisely to misuse them. And you will not be surprised I hope to hear me say that I don’t think we can just do without them, as if questions of truthfulness had no place in religion. So how should we think of them? 

          I think there is something quite helpful about singing creeds rather than simply saying them. Creeds are not simply a list of facts like ‘Exeter is a city; 2+2 is 4; everyone has two parents’ and so on. But neither is it just a list of preferences like ‘I like chocolate, football, cats, Bach’. The creed is not so much a list of facts or feelings as a vision of the universe to be inhabited. To sing it is to place oneself, tentatively perhaps, within that vision. It is much more a commitment of how we orient our life, than about what we think or feel. This is what it means to sing ‘I believe’. It is at once a rich and complex vision, the entirety of the Christian faith, summed up in these few pregnant paragraphs; and also a simple one. It is not something we have to master intellectually before we can say it, indeed it can never be mastered; it is a much more like a great landscape to be explored, with deep valleys and high mountains which we will never completely exhaust. There may be bits of it we don’t get or even bits we don’t particularly like, but we carry on exploring. The creed is a song of praise, a sort of prayer, asking for grace to believe.        

          It is also not just a private vision. I think people find this particularly difficult these days sadly. [We modern people tend to think that everything can be divided into obvious things that are universal (like science) and disputed things that are private (like tastes in music or food).] But the creeds, the Christian faith that they summarise, is not something we make up ourselves, it is a vision we share with others across the world and through the ages. Our creeds developed centuries ago and have endured through the ages and across the divisions of the Church because their original purpose was not to define something new, but simply to sum up the catholic faith, the ‘universal’ consensus, to prevent people from trying to close this down or distort it according to narrow private agendas. These creeds are tried and tested!

          I sometimes think of creeds and doctrine as rather like the grammar which helps to keep our ordinary prayer coherent. If this is so, then we should remember that being able to speak ordinary language is the important thing, grammar exists to serve it, not the other way round. No one has perfect grammar and not everyone needs to be a grammarian. But equally, as perhaps the last thirty years of education may finally have taught us, things go pretty disastrously wrong if you think you can manage without grammar altogether…

          So if we find something difficult to say, we should remember the limitations of all our language when speaking of God. ‘His understanding is unsearchable’ as Isaiah put it in our first reading. As the great theologians and mystics remind us, we slip into idolatry if we think our human words describe God literally, including, it may be worth recalling incidentally, the language of male and female… But it is better to be humble about what our words may mean, and to keep exploring other ways of speaking, than to try and purify our language, to tidy up what we have received to fit our own prejudices. This is a rich and complex vision that the creeds give us, and we need to be careful if we think we can ‘fix’ it.

          So having said all this about how I think creeds work, what they are for, we come to what our creeds actually say, which of course is what we celebrate today on this Trinity Sunday. Our creeds offer a vision of the One God who is Father Son and Holy Spirit. They are a slightly unpacked version of that ‘name’ which Our Lord instructs his disciples to use in baptism in today’s gospel. As I’ve said in previous years, this Trinitarian name, Father Son and Holy Spirit, sums up our whole Christian faith, it is its wonderful heart, at once a unique and radical vision of God, and yet one that includes all that is true in every other view: 

We believe in a God who is not silent, but reveals himself. We believe in a God who speaks not through books or angels, but whose Word becomes human in Jesus Christ and lives amongst us. We believe in a God who saves us not by dissolving us, or keeping us at arm’s length, but by making his home in us through his Spirit, incorporating us into his own life, by making us divine! God became human to make us divine! This is not some impersonal amoral ‘force’ nor the big lonely tyrant god somewhere behind the sky, but the personal, relational God of love. Many of the early Christian writers have seen hints of this vision in our own human personality, the mystery of our freedom, our desire to go beyond ourselves in relationships, to seek communion. 

Finally then, it seems that all those words of the creed are simply a way of holding onto the richness of this extraordinary vision, the same vision which I once saw summed up in even fewer words above the pulpit in a tiny whitewashed Welsh nonconformist chapel, with no other decoration, those three words were ‘God is Love’.   

          In nomine…                          

 AMEN.