I'm rather shocked that RNS thinks that Unitarians are monotheists and Trinitarians are not. Kind of misses the point, no?

Today, in a class that explores our faith and our ministries, I gave the class a copy of the Nicene Creed and a pencil. The directions for the exercise: draw a line through any part of this creed you do not believe. Not a single person failed to strike out about a third to half. One left only, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. The composition of the group: a retired professor of theology and church history, 2 clergy, 4 Episcopalians, 2 ELCA Lutherans, 1 Presbyterian. The simple fact is, that on any given Sunday, if you asked a congregation how many present believe the entire Nicene Creed as it is written, my best estimate is fewer than 25% would say so. Perhaps we already have a Church with less doctrine than we imagine in practice. Perhaps the failure to acknowledge it is why people cannot get younger people to come to church. We ask our congregants to ask someone to come to church with them on Sunday. I think that's the wrong question. We should ask as we walk from Church, "What happened here today that would make anyone want to come?"

Bill, I think we can excuse the RNS for being imprecise while explaining a concept that's hard to grasp on the best of days.

I have always thought that if Christian Unitarian churches still existed I would have been happy to have been one.

I don't believe the Catholic creeds are meant to be held singly as a litmus test for personal faith or rigidly as the center of our worship. Rather, they offer us the interpretive lens we carry together to understand our stories and tradition and what God is doing for us.

Our contemporary problem is we attach literal intellectual assent to "I believe" rather than a deeper sense of following and seeking meaning. That's our problem, not the creeds'.

I agree a creedless church is a rudderless one. A church whose members wrestle with the meaning of the creeds and hold them in that tension of truth seeking together is alive. A church that utters the creeds without engagement is dead.

But I don't believe the UUA IS truly "creed-less" . . . anymore than I believe any human being is "creed-less".

The question is WHICH creed you believe, not whether. [But I agree w/ you, Richard H, re the Nicene Creed not being meant as a personal statement-of-faith. It's a communal song we, as the gathered community, sing. It doesn't punch your individual ticket to heaven (Heaven is "Come, Y'all!")]

For the UUA, the question is whether their particular non-Nicene, non-doctrinal creed is sufficient for the communal gathering. While it's "not my cup of tea", I rather hope it IS sufficient. They do much good, and any kind of corporate supernatural doctrine may be a bridge too far for many.

JC Fisher

JCF,

I agree -- none of us is truly "creed-less." The real danger is the unexamined one that we each might carry by virtue of our birth, culture, or life experience. Another way the Catholic creeds work in our liturgical use of them is to challenge our parochial "programming," even if that means only counter-balancing a sermon that goes off the theological rails!

Still, I have the feeling that our recent liberal aversion to the creeds, for all the foibles of their history, is more about us and our impoverished literalizing than the creeds themselves. Where else do we find such a succinct statement of how God's grace has manifested in our tradition?

At my age (90) I really don't worry much about the catholic creeds. I regard them largely as a good way to remember while at worship what inspired and motivated Christians who xame before and made my beliefs possible. So I can say the creeds with gusto, whatever my personal reservations.

When it comes to the UUA, I have a true story. When I was the student pastor of a New England Congregational Church, back in my early days before I ended up a layman in the Episcopal Church, the one who served before me was a retired Unitarian clergyman. One day he explained that he was a "Christian Unitarian", in fact so much so that he and other like-minded Unitarians used to gather at an island home he owned in Portland harbor, to celebrate the Eucharist and that they did so in such a secluded place because otherwise their "heretical" activity might be discovered and they would be defrocked!

Herb Gray

I don't end with the Creed, or try to make myself "believe" the Creed. Rather, the Creeds, Scripture and all the rest is where I start from, and from this I either accept, reject, modify or ignore, but I don't throw out. If I'm gonna be a Christian, that's the case. I don't go to church reciting from the Upanishads, or sing Allahu Akbar instead of Alleluia. Christianity is something with which one identifies, then engages with. The idea that it is something to be believed without inquiry and followed with a fear of deviance has led Christianity down some strange ol' roads, and not all of them end at living waters and living bread. Some people even wind up dead.

But concerning UU's, well, bless their heart, they're doing what they need to do, and they do good work in many cases. But I would find all that um..."stuff" about "worth-ship" and "soulful evenings" and "mingling the waters", and "searches for meaning", and "living the questions", not to mention all the identity theologies, to be tiresome, wordy and unsatisfying. Yawn.

@ Herb, I wish those Unitarians would come back, they might be fun. They still exist in New England, but especially in Transylvania and Hungary, where they've survived persecution and have been around for like 500 yrs now, happily Christian and Unitarian, liberal and deeply traditional; they even have a Bishop!

Frankly I do not think that a deacon should be authorizing or encouraging Christians to strike out parts of the creed.