Confessing and Believing

The Apostles' Creed as Script for the Christian Life

Trevor Hart

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506485478
• eBook ISBN: 9781506485485
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Confessing and Believing, Trevor Hart takes readers on a guided tour of the Apostles' Creed, one of the most ancient, universally recognized, and important statements of faith ever penned by the Christian Church. The Creeds' lasting value is not owed simply to its age--it has identifiable roots in the earliest baptismal ceremonies of the earliest Christians--but because, as Hart's careful interpretation demonstrates, the Creed is as comprehensive in its scope as it is concise in its testimony. While the Creeds' intrinsic values make it ideal for regular use in worship, Hart capitalizes on the Creed's structure and highly concentrated nature to provide a framework for teaching the essentials of Christian belief.

Hart reveals that there is far more to the Creed than ancient statements about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or the Church. Hart employs the Creeds' twelve clauses to reveal the vibrant theology behind, in, and in front of the Creed. His interpretation of the Creed is not just an historical exercise, i.e., to discover what Christians once believed, but to understand "what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all"--and to do so in a way that addresses the intellectual and cultural contexts of the 21st Century. Hart's perceptive analysis reveals why the Creed has been, is, and will continue to be both confessed and believed.

III

9

“I believe in the Holy Spirit . . .”

The language of “spirit” is back in vogue again, it seems. After half a century or more during which only whatever could be weighed, measured, tripped over, or bumped into was considered to deserve the accolade “real,” the occupants of Western societies have at last grown tired of treating themselves as the mere accumulations of atoms—complex mechanical or organic systems susceptible in principle to exhaustive analysis and explanation in the terms admitted by white-coated, dispassionate verifiers of “reality,” or as we know them, practitioners in the natural sciences.1 Having, as they say, been there, done that, and been sold the T-shirt, we have discovered that the shirt is an awkward fit after all and has begun to chafe. So we are ready to reckon seriously again with the claim that our humanity is more expansive and more intricate than any merely material description could ever account for. A more ambitious vision of reality is called for, we now suspect, if we are to avoid the atrophying of our souls, having failed for too long either to attend to or to nourish an entire dimension of our creaturely being in the world. If the material order presents itself to us with an undeniable force and immediacy, we are nonetheless increasingly called upon to acknowledge that we are immersed in, keyed into, and made an integral part of a wider moral, aesthetic, and “spiritual” order too—a depth of reality whose claims and demands upon us will not be ignored or denied except at the cost of our flourishing.

While, therefore, cultural commentary remains fascinated by developments on the front of so-called artificial intelligence (still typically imagined as humanoid in form despite the advent of autonomous vacuum cleaners, self-driving vehicles, and the ubiquitous, dulcet but disembodied tones of “Alexa”2), what drives such curiosity and concern is a desire to be able to say what sets the truly “human” apart, transcending the counterfeiting initiatives of even the most sophisticated robotics, actual or anticipated. We are not (and if we are honest with ourselves, we know we are not) the mere flesh-and-blood “machines” that reductionist naturalism seems to envisage and would certainly have us believe. There is a dimension, or a “mode,” or a “field” of human existence and agency that stubbornly resists any such analysis, and with it are bound up most of the things that we value most about our own humanity and the humanity of others. Delineating the scope and describing the nature of this distinctive sphere have always been challenging, and they remain no less so in an age where the mapping of material reality itself has reached such an advanced stage. Yet the primacy and ultimacy of our engagements with it (whether that be the “inner world” of personal consciousness or the mysterious depth of the many different sorts of “things” that confront us, forever resisting and frustrating exhaustive and reductive analyses) drives us to take this sphere seriously, refusing its relegation to the category of the merely epiphenomenal or illusory. And it compels constant resort to the strategies of poetry—as it always has—in order to speak of it, for speak of it we must.3

No doubt many factors (some of them less than appetizing) must be reckoned with in order to account for the resurgence of the institutions of “religion” in the postmodern cultures of the West. Behind the evidence of polls and census results indicating large numbers now content to identify as “spiritual” (even as they eschew the label “religious”), it is probable that we should trace a genuine thirst for depths long since erased from the social imaginaries and attendant public liturgies of societies like ours.4 We should be cautious, though, in our evaluation of all this of the significance for Christian mission and ministry in the world. Renewed enthusiasm for the vocabulary of “spirit,” “spiritual,” and “spirituality” in society at large may or may not be something for the church to welcome with enthusiasm. After all, talk of what is “spiritual” in this context is often little more than a borrowing of language (language, to be sure, with a long religious pedigree) to express the conviction that there are things—“real” things and not the mere objects of illusion or human invention—lying beyond the limits of whatever material stuff we take to exist. But while the reality of “nonmaterial” stuff is certainly part of what many religious traditions, including Christianity, tell us about the world and about ourselves, taking it seriously hardly entails believing in God as such—let alone the God of the gospel—or even being sympathetic to such belief. Christians, for example, as we have already seen, hold the view that all sorts of “things unseen” as well as those things “seen” or engaged concretely via our senses are to be reckoned with in the world God has made for our indwelling.5 But such nonmaterial entities are precisely creaturely and finite, and the difference between them and God in this regard is as vast as that between God and the basest of material substances or simplest single-cell organic life-forms. “Spiritual” reality as such, then, is certainly neither God nor yet even “divine” but merely a stratum of that complex and diverse reality which God has created. Furthermore, as a moment’s reflection should serve to remind us, nonmaterial realities come in any case in all shapes and sizes and flavors, not all of which are harmless or even healthy, let alone good or godly. Evil, in fact, whatever we make of it, does not lend itself to weighing and measuring in either imperial or metric units and so must be classified as “spiritual” in the relevant sense.

There are, of course, enormous goods to be found in the world of “spiritual” reality in this broad sense, some of which, albeit fully creaturely in the forms under which we are familiar with and experience them (love, mercy, compassion, justice, wisdom, joy, peace, and others), seem to render the category of “things unseen” as such an appropriate enough field from which to reap metaphors in our attempts to speak meaningfully of God (or, conversely, God’s attempt to reveal Godself to us in terms fit for purpose). Picturing God in terms of spiritual realities of this sort seems less strained somehow, less of an awkward stretch, than the use of available material metaphors. To call God “spirit,” it seems, causes us less of a mental crunch of gears than thinking of God as a rock, or a roaring lion, or an eagle, or a raging fire, despite the enthusiasm with which Scripture itself deploys such down-to-earth images alongside many others and encourages us to do the same.6 The important thing, though, is to remind ourselves that “spirit” is no less a poetic image in our application of it to God. God is, in a vitally important sense, no more “spirit” than God is a rock or a fire or, in the prophet Hosea’s wonderful image, “maggots.”7 No, God is the uncreated creator of all things, both seen and unseen, and, as such, wholly distinct from all else. Again, we should be mindful that the category of so-called spiritual realities includes all that is in creation most thoroughly opposed to who God is as well as those things that, we may think, in some sense reflect God rather more helpfully or are better attuned to the reality of God. And we should observe that this particular poetic image, like most others, even as it fixes reality for us in a meaningful way, nonetheless cannot do so without a playful surplus of meaning that thwarts our desire to pin anything down too firmly or too precisely. Thus as we shall see, the Hebrew noun ruach can be translated not only as “spirit” but equally as “breath” or even “wind,” that dynamic force of nature in which areas of high pressure encounter areas of low pressure and, contrary to Shakespeare’s Gertrude and the metaphysicians of ancient Greece, air shifts in ways that—as any sailor, cyclist, or hill walker will gladly testify—prove it to be anything but “incorporal.”8 Sometimes dramatically (and frustratingly) so, in fact; it often manifests itself rather in the form of “a substantial entity with weight, texture, energy, motion and moods all of its own.”9

So before we get carried away in a sort of theological flaying, enthusiastically pursuing “fleshless” images as those with which to work in our thinking and speaking of God, we should pause and remember that all images, including “spirit,” have their roots sunk deeply in the soil of our material, embodied existence and experience and will not finally be torn out of that soil without the risk of a significant loss of sense.10 The interplay between nonmaterial and material connotations in the Bible’s talk of ruach (whether the ruach of God or that of God’s creatures) points us, in fact, toward a wider biblical eschewal of any dualism between the bodily and the spiritual aspects of creation. Such a dualism is to be found, for instance, in the dichotomy between a realm of particular material things (kosmos aesthetos) and the “divine” realm of universal forms to which the mind/soul properly belongs (kosmos noetos), on which most classical Greek philosophy is founded. Whatever spirit means biblically and theologically, therefore, for Christians, it need not and should not entail the denigration of the world of flesh-and-blood existence, nor yet the disentangling of something called “spirit” or “soul” from it so that it can fly free and unpolluted into a transcendent eternity. Instead, things visible and things invisible are mixed together unashamedly within the fabric of God’s creation, and “soul” or “spirit” cannot be siphoned off or surgically disentangled from the world of our embodied existence any more than they can be reduced to it in the manner attempted by materialists. Rather, the world of spirit (far from being an “airy nothing”) is “bodied forth” in a world of material realities, while body has its own reality only when it is granted ruach (and, with it, life) by its creator as a gift.11 Differentiate between these dimensions of our creaturely nature for convenience we may and perhaps must; but separate them out we must not attempt to do, for dissection is bound in this instance to leave both material and nonmaterial dimensions of our creaturely reality fatally lacking what is needed for survival, let alone thriving.12

Such unavoidable entanglement of “spirit” with matter, though, does not render the chosen image any less pure or less fitting for our use in thinking and speaking of God. The fact of its being earthed in the world of the flesh just as securely as other more obviously solid and corporal metaphors is not a problem precisely because the God who reveals himself as Spirit among other things is a God who is known most fully and finally not in and through allegedly disembodied “spiritual” realities but in the flesh and blood of our humanity itself. And having made this his own and reconciled it to himself, God then lifts it up to share in “life in all its fulness,” a life that is neither biological nor ethereal but spiritual in a quite different sense—that is, the fruit of God’s own indwelling through the Holy Spirit in a creation renewed by God’s love, penetrating materiality itself (together with whatever nonmaterial dimensions or levels creation may be reckoned to possess) with the redemptive presence of God’s own life. God, in other words, did not and does not “abhor” the often messy and reputedly “base” stuff of material existence, nor in our attempts to think and speak clearly of God can we.13 C. S. Lewis, therefore, calls “muddle headed” the sort of Christianity that supposes materiality to be beneath God, and escaping from the body’s clutches the highest “spiritual” aspiration. “There is no good,” Lewis advises, “trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”14 More than this, he continues, God invented it, it seems, precisely so that, in due course, God might make it God’s own, sharing in its life fully and personally so that we in our turn might come to share at last in God’s life, God’s joy, God’s glory and do so in a manner that is bodily just as surely as it is spiritual.15

One final note will bear reiteration and reinforcement before we move on: spirit, we have reminded ourselves, is a poetic image, a metaphor borrowed from the realm of our human experience and used now to speak of God. All metaphors suggest (and, if they are apposite, draw our attention to) illuminating strands of likeness between one thing and another, helping us, among other things, trace the web of interconnectedness between things that is often buried deep beneath reality’s surfaces. But metaphors remind us, too, of the abiding differences between those realities of which they speak, differences that are considerable and altogether more apparent if we attend to surface appearances alone.16 If, to alight on a popular example, we are to appreciate the force of the metaphorical assertion that “Achilles is a lion,” it matters greatly that we grasp the fact that Achilles is actually not a lion at all and that there are all sorts of things about lions, therefore, that should we seek them in Achilles, we shall be bound not to find.17 To anticipate finding them would be altogether mistaken and likely, in fact, only to confuse the issue, cluttering the field of perception with irrelevant expectation and so occluding the underlying thread of connection rather than helping us trace and grasp it appropriately. With a metaphor, we must say, there is always a palpable “split reference,” a high degree of abiding contraindication in which what is so generously given with one hand is constantly taken away again with the other, a poetic give-and-take that, Paul Ricoeur suggests, is conveniently captured in the tantalizing internal play of the dialectical suggestion that “it is and it is not.”18 Achilles is a lion, and yet, of course, he is not; he is a man. If, for the purposes of our ordinary daily discourse, an argument is a container (which may therefore “have holes” and may or may not “hold water”), it does not occur to us to inquire whether it is made of plastic or some more ecologically friendly substance.19 And if, in the poet’s eye, an image can be seen to “lurk behind each word” or our eagerness be “reined in,” we recognize perfectly well the companion truth that they cannot, neither having any material form to speak of.20

If differences of this sort between creaturely realities (whether visible or invisible) demand that the whisper “It is not!” be audible at the shoulder of every metaphorical conjunction, who are we to say where metaphors are deployed, as they must be and are, in order to speak of God?21 For God is, as the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas reminds us, “more distant from any creature than any two creatures are from each other.”22 In other words, when compared to the most fundamental difference of all—that between the uncreated creator and that which is created (i.e., between God and everything else that exists)—those readily identifiable between archangels and amoebas, black holes and blackheads, or calculus and cabbages pale rapidly into insignificance. In an important sense, therefore, every use of language drawn from the realm of our creaturely existence (and we have no other language to use) is, when we use it of God, confronted by the challenge of unimaginable difference and involves a surprising poetic leap across a gap that yawns wider than any other we shall ever encounter.

What this means is that even the most familiar and cherished of the words we habitually use in speaking about or speaking to God (i.e., in both theology and liturgy in their widest senses) are, strictly speaking, metaphors—characterized by their being drawn from one context (what Janet Soskice refers to helpfully as their natural or proper “domain of application”23) to speak suggestively (and, we trust, appropriately) now of a very different reality indeed.24 Even such mainstays of Christian God talk as “Father,” “Son,” “good,” “merciful,” “righteous,” and “love” are, on this understanding of the circumstance, stretched to a breaking point over the chasm presented by God’s radical otherness—the fact that God is God meaning inevitably that these words (or any others) cannot mean whatever exactly they mean when we use them in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Memorizing Mere Christianity
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index