Creed and My Resistance

Perhaps my resistance to creed is mostly in relation to the "authority" piece of creed. Perhaps I am having trouble divorcing the practical from the theoretical. My grandmother, in her 80s, confessed to me that she could not believe in the virgin birth and in discussing it with me, it was clear to me how much distress this had caused her over the years. She feared working out the questions because she thought she would lose friends if they knew she believed "wrong." I think it's a tragedy that this might be the kind of thing that kept my grandmother up at night, because her views on the subject had very little to do with her witness (and maybe discouraged it).

I think I can get behind an idea of "my creed," but when it becomes "our creed," I worry about its tendency to alienate. I want the atheist, the monotheist, and the polytheist (etc), to all feel welcome at my church and I worry that a creed might keep one of them from entering.

Perhaps I spoke too broadly originally. I can see how creed can be unifying and life-giving for some communities and people and that the development and evolution of creeds gives us a useful view of history. That history, however, in each of those moments when creed was created, is generally marked by divisions and silences. Aware of the difficulty of divorcing words from their historical usages, I think a creed might have more tendency to elicit harm than good within the kind of community I hope to work as a part of-- one composed, in good number, by those who have been harmed by church traditions or experienced them narrowly, but negatively.

I think each of us is a member of whatever tradition we're a part of as much because of what they are as because of what they aren't. Each time someone tells me that my way (or someone else's way) of being Christian "isn't Christian," I hold onto my noncreedal church and feel so supported by its commitment to theological diversity. I can cherry-pick biblical material with that person back and forth, but there is something about saying, "no, we refuse to draw the lines" (even if they're dotted) that is important to me.