A Dueling Duo over the Creeds

Every now and then I do these things I call "Dueling Duos". Love 'em or hate 'em.

Over at Fighting for the Faith podcast, you can find this interview with Doug Pagitt. In it Doug says the following:

I think the function of a Creed was to open things up. Wh…if you look at the history of why Creeds are…were utilized, it was because there was division within the church. And the function of the Creed was to say, “We have a lot of things we disagree about, but we all hold together to these things”. So it was an act of commonality, not an act of distilling down. So, it was saying, “Of all of the things that we have, we held these in common”. It was an act of commonality, not an act of distilling themdown. And so, that’s why I think that the Creeds function differently — I would say— than a modern day statement of faith. A modern day statement of faith is trying to say, “We believe these things as in contrast to that guy over there who believes that thing”. But a Creed was trying to say, “There’s a lot of disagreement about these things, but here’s what we know we do hold to”. And it was never meant to be the end of the conversation…

Um…but, the…the…the function of it then was to…to try to include all who could possibly be included in…in the faith. It wasn’t meant to say, “We want those guys out”. Now, I think guys like Augustine did that. I think that there were certain writers and there were certain theologians who did it; but the function of the Creeds themselves was not to do that. And I think that people took those Creeds and they used them in ways that they shouldn’t have, but that wasn’t the function of the Creed. So this is where it‘s a little hard to say, “How did people of certain traditions use those Creeds differs from the functionality of the Creed?”

[transcript]

So that made me think of this from R. Scott Clark in the book Reforming or Conforming.

Historically, it has been the function of ecclesiastical creeds (e.g., the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed) and confessions (e.g., the Belgic Confession and the Westminster Confession) to establish boundaries. Jaroslave Pelikan says,

"One of the most persistent features of all creeds and confessions of faith...so persistent as to be obvious and therefore in danger of being overlooked--especially in the aftermath of teh modern controversies over liberal theology--is the utter seriousness with which they treat the issues of Christian doctrine as quite literally, a matter of life and death, both here in time and hereafter in eternity."

In the history of the church, the boundaries of biblical interpretation have been established not by modernity (in its liquid or solid states), but by the catholic church. This consensus about the teaching of Scripture is reflected in catholic or ecumenical creeds...The opening line of the Athanasian Creed is and should be shocking to later modern pluralism: "Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith." The traditional name of the Athanasian Creed actually comes from the first two words of the Latin text, "Quincunque vult," that is, "whosoever will..." This is the language of dogma, or ecclesiastical decree. This is not a proposition to be debated or discussed or viewed from an endless series of perspectives. By the nature of such language, options and choices are inherently limited. This is language from another time and place. It is the language of Christian antiquity."

All I'll say is this all reminds me of that song from Sesame Street, "one of these things is not like the other." Someone is not handling church history like everyone else [or at least like the scholars in the field].