Creedal Orthodoxy Won’t Save Us

Pundits tell us that we are moving beyond the culture wars. Left and right are merging in their common judgment that liberalism has reached a dead end. Something new is emerging. Maybe. My sense is that we’re seeing simple exhaustion. To be sure, an enervating weariness can lead to its own developments. But when it comes to the long-standing issues of sexuality—the nub of our culture wars—“development” is usually a bad thing.

I have colleagues, friends, and former students who are instinctively traditional, but they are ready to put the whole debate over same-sex blessings and marriage behind them. They have seen their congregations divided, their denominations decimated, their seminary faculties dissolved over the issue. It’s all been a pool of tears. “Enough!” they say. The whole matter of gay marriage is now engrained in civil law and receives a high level of social acceptance: Maybe that’s a sign. And, they reason, there are many gay Christians who are not advocates of wacky theology. They, like my colleagues, friends, and former students, just want a steady kind of creedal orthodoxy. That common cause should be enough.

But is it enough? Is “creedal orthodoxy” sufficient for establishing the Christian faith? I would say, “Absolutely not!” Necessary, surely. But never sufficient. Scholasticism was a marvelous achievement. But one of its sorrier legacies has been to encourage people to think that theological knowledge is a matter of skillfully mixing the right ingredients, in the right order and quantity, so that a well-formed divine cake might emerge. I fear that those who tout “creedal orthodoxy” are advocating for “aesthetic orthodoxy,” an abstract contraption of Christian claims that sounds and looks beautiful: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Mary, Pilate, the Church, resurrection, and apostolic continuity; all intertwined in a neat package, wrapped in solemn hymns and prayers, and proffered to the warring parties of our society as a calming balm.

Aesthetic orthodoxy—theologically correct doctrines that hang together elegantly like a conceptual mobile—will fail to heal the rifts in our churches and common life, because such a contraption is not sufficiently true to God’s own life, gifts, and calling. Instead of creedal orthodoxy, we need genetic orthodoxy, an approach that makes the Book of Genesis foundational to our faith, a faith that arises from the generative life given to us by God in our creation and redemption. I say: Let the progressive and conservative, the exhausted and the still-militant combatants, put Genesis between them and, as Thomas Cranmer put it in his famous prayer, “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the book. Only then may we “embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.”

Genesis describes God’s creative work and will; the material flesh of human form and its divinely vital breath; sexual difference and intercourse; covetousness and anger; murder and sorrow; love and longing; trickery and lies; divine leading and judgment; tribes and peoples; more love and death; more sex and children; more anger and envy—and more God. When it comes to human purposes, though “you meant it for evil,” “God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). We know the stories, but for some reason we fail to recognize their utterly essential framing of “orthodoxy,” somehow preferring a conceptual architecture to the living stuff of human life as ordered by our Creator. The doctrinal framework can be reworked, trimmed, renovated, translated into a blueprint; but only the outflow of life, human and divine, can be inhabited, butted against, struggled with, run after or run from, and offered—as the word “orthodoxy” implies—to glorify God. Note well: St. Paul urges us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12:1). 

Creedal orthodoxy has no room for Israel. Israel is not mentioned in the great creeds. That should be a flagrant clue that they alone are not sufficient to the gospel and the Christian faith. If one counters that Israel is “implicated” in the Apostles’ Creed (the Virgin Mary leads us to the New Testament, which leads us to Matthew’s genealogy and Luke’s birth narratives, and Bethlehem and the rest), then by all means explicate this. But creedal orthodoxy too easily eschews such elaborations. How could the genealogy of Jesus be something we are required to build into the doctrinal structure? Israel—the “struggler with God,” as the angel dubs Jacob in Genesis 32:28—is a character of agony that has no place in the Creed, which is calm, solemn, stable. But the truth of God is a life of striving, pushing, being pressed, coming to be, disappearing, being revived. How did a confession of faith that has at its center the passion, cross, and resurrection of Jesus ever come to be seen as stable? Yet this is what we are being told can calm the fury of the culture wars.

If the Creed taken alone offers no room for Israel, it directs us even less toward the Law, with its supposedly outmoded “legal demands” (Col. 2:14). To be sure, Christians have wrestled over the Law. That’s just the point: There is such a struggle at the heart of our lives with God, and it is built into the beginning of our creaturely existence, where obedience and faith, righteousness and sin, repentance and forgiveness, punishment and mercy saturate both earth and heaven, flesh and spirit. That is the testimony of Genesis. 

The Creed does not speak of the struggle of faithful living. It is for this reason that genetic orthodoxy, unlike creedal orthodoxy, has something to say about the contours of the Christian life, and what it says is traditional: male, female, nuptial union, sex, children, families, death, and generations—all under God’s dominion. Genetic orthodoxy learns from Genesis that faithful living is not stable and serene. It is filled with pitfalls, yearnings, failures, sterilities, confusions, unexpected joys, regrets, wandering loves, and the rest. There is a line, but it is one that wavers and wobbles, sometimes frays and dissolves, only to be wrenched back into its clarity of direction. What a book Genesis is, and what a history are the books to which it gives rise! Tutored by Scripture, one might expect culture wars at various points along the way, however exhausting they may prove. Building a house and sustaining a household is exhausting, too, all the more so the household of God. God lifts us up from the ground as we move forward.

The Creed has an essential place in Christian confession and understanding. It is not secondary to some other set of claims, and it is certainly not optional in our catechesis and praise. But on this point we must be clearheaded: Acknowledging and cleaving to the Creed isn’t a substitute for the “whole duty of man.” That, we are told, can be epitomized thus: “Fear God and keep his commandments” (Eccle. 12:13). Deep and broad, this double-barreled commandment involves a life and a heart; the world and the Church; Israel, the Law, and the Prophets; the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles.  

If genetic orthodoxy is not a border crossing where passports are required or watchwords and secret handshakes are enacted, what attitudes does it demand for those who are “orthodox”? Genetic orthodoxy is a current, a movement through life. One must therefore learn to swim, maintain strength, get wet, be tossed about, be cast upon rocks, and keep going. These capacities, by the way, come up in Scripture on a regular basis. Think of Abraham. Think of St. Paul. The Apostles’ Creed has us acclaim “the communion of saints.” That is the great current into which baptism plunges us, the force of which we must allow to press upon us. 

This acceptance is perhaps the most difficult in our era, where “orthodoxy” of any kind is viewed as a cruel rigidity. Genesis is the great book of human nobility and meanness together, courage and cowardice, generosity and parsimony. Patience of a profound sort is the mark of faithful living in this kind of world. The story of Joseph ends the book. Long and detailed, it epitomizes such patience in a single life that, bound to the generative character of his family’s destiny, takes in a father’s death and the glimmering divine possibilities of the future. If we must be exhausted, let it be within the household of this hope.