Creed

I do not see much of a role for creed in faith communities today, which is why I belong to a non-creedal tradition.  The UCC's non-creedal stance is very important to me because I find most expressions of creed to be exclusionary.  I think there is some sense of authority inherent in “creed” that I resist.  I can respect the ways that some suggest playing with creed, but then I sort of wonder what the difference is between creed or Bible commentary or theology in general if it no longer holds its authority.  I don’t know if I am explaining this well, but I guess I think, “If we are playing with the role creed has played throughout history and removing its declarative, didactic qualities, is it still creed?”  I suppose it is unclear to me why we hold onto this.  

Perhaps it is worth paralleling this with my turn from using “Kingdom” language to “Kin-dom” language.  Is “creed” so fraught with damaging connotations that it makes more sense to discard it?  For me as a fairly “heretical” Christian, the answer is yes.  I also worry about creed’s tendency toward reductive theology in a way I consider somewhat dangerous.  How can you reduce the text and tradition to a 3x5 card?  It seems like the wrong response to “tell me what the Bible says while I stand on one foot.”  Unlike the response, “Love your God with all your mind, heart, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself,” creed has a tendency to approach a level of specificity that I feel can be misleading because it is also so brief and removed from the context which generated the ideas.   Creeds are complex enough to be subject to literalism and normalization in ways that “Love your neighbor” isn’t.  Creeds seem reductionist to me, but in a way that is also detailed enough to imply that it’s “what you need to know.”

I feel like this is rambling, but my experience of creeds has been as oppressive, not unifying or invitational.  While I like the idea of a narrative heuristic, “creed” holds too many negative connotations for me.  I also think that a non-creedal stance is a commitment to theological diversity in our communities (although that isn’t always the case practically).