LOST IN WONDER, LOVE, AND PRAISE: CREEDAL LANGUAGE AND CHRISTIAN WORSHIP
During this 1700th year since the Council of Nicaea, much has and continues to be said about this council’s importance in establishing the limits of Christian orthodoxy past and present and how these limits were born out of the Church’s conflict with Arianism. The theological positions of Nicaea against Arius and his followers were eventually codified into a creed which, after some further additions and precisions added at the First Council of Constantinople just over half a century later, became what is today generally called the “Nicene Creed.” The Apostles’ Creed, while not itself directly produced as a result of theological conflict, establishes clear parameters for Christian distinctiveness against Judaism and the wider Gentile/Pagan context of the ancient Mediterranean. Both of these creeds delineate clear boundaries between what is considered orthodox Christianity and what is not. More than merely a matter for academic theologians to discuss, these creeds are a part of the experience of Christian worship for most expressions of mainline catholic Christianity. In an age which rightly values inclusivity and churches which emphasize welcoming the spiritually curious, the question can be raised as to whether the inclusion of creeds in Christian worship is pastorally appropriate. In what follows, I suggest that creedal language as it is experienced liturgically should be understood as doxological language, that is, the language of liturgy which is that of wonder, love, and praise serving to both glorify God and remind human beings of their call to love God and neighbor as themselves. In going about this, we’ll first look at what characterizes liturgical language before noting how this affects our understanding of creedal language in the liturgy. We will see that the creed in the liturgy is a means of forming our minds, hearts, and souls after that of Christ and therefore is an instrument of encounter and inclusion rather than divisiveness and exclusion.
Characteristics of Liturgical Language
In his 2018 book, The Language of Liturgy: A Ritual Poetics, David Jaspers argues that one should approach liturgical language as one approaches a good poem. Liturgy like poetry attempts to express in words what functionally exceeds them and retains therefore both a knowability and sense of strange mysteriousness. Writing in the 16th century, Thomas Morley describes his failed attempts at courting a young woman thusly:
April is in my mistress’ face,
And July in her eyes hath place;
Within her bosom is September,
But in her heart a cold December. (1)
Rather than just telling us that the young woman was physically attractive but romantically distant, Morley metaphorically uses the months of the year to describe her traits. The use of metaphor also shrouds the woman and her reactions (or lack thereof) with a certain mysteriousness: her bosom, normally a place of warmth and nurture is showing the signs of impending coldness, just as September’s first autumnal leaves point to the end of Summer and the approaching winter. The language is subtle and careful, leaving room for mystery and also importantly leaving room for the listener or reader to creatively imagine for herself just what Morley is getting at. The meaning appropriated is then more intuitive than rational and therefore arguably more internalized and memorable.
When it comes to liturgical language, Jasper notes that:
The liturgy, like most great poetry, places words, even familiar words, under the strain for profound mysteries. Liturgical language is primary, unlike the necessary but still secondary language of theological articulation upon which the liturgy both draws and feeds. It nourishes the imagination, of which the best description in English remains that of the poet S.T. Coleridge from the early nineteenth century as ‘the Living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’(2)
Liturgical language, like good poetry places words and concepts under pressure, “under the strain for profound mysteries” as Jaspers puts it. The language of theological speculation, while necessary and important, is always secondary to the language of worship and liturgy. This is because liturgy is the privileged place for a real and potentially transformative encounter with God and as such it de-centers us. Moreover, liturgical language compels us to humbly admit that the truth and experience mediated by liturgical language is shrouded in holy mystery and must be approached carefully and reverently rather than as yet another piece of information we can store away and use to win debates and create barriers, theological or others. Importantly, it also nourishes and fuels the imagination through its use of metaphor and analogy. Unlike modern forms of knowledge which bracket imagination as being unimportant to “true” knowledge, here the creative use of the imagination is a human (and therefore limited) participation in that “Living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception” which comes from God. Liturgical language, then, fuels our imagination to respond creatively to how God is active in creating and sustaining here and now.
How does this relate to the liturgical recitation of the Creed? Surely, creedal statements are not merely poetic or merely metaphorical? To think this way is, ultimately, to fall into the modern trap of establishing a dichotomous binary between rational and intuitive forms of knowledge where (to quote theologian Paul Avis) “the former is hailed as the vehicle of knowledge, mastery and progress” and “the latter dismissed as the source of ignorance, superstition, and illusion.” (3) What is needed is a holistic understanding of knowledge holding together its rational and intuitive aspects rather than dismissing the latter as being less “real” than the former. More to the point and to make this all less abstract: one can expound the important intricacies of Nicene theology, but if one does not have an experience of “God the Father Almighty” and “the Only Begotten Son of the Father” who was “born of His Father before all worlds” as being living and active in one’s life, one may have an understanding of theology without a living knowledge of God. (4) It is not expected that everyone praying the Creed on Sunday morning or during Morning Prayer use that opportunity to engage in theological speculation. Rather, what is aimed at is the prayerful recitation of these words leading to an awareness of God’s action and activity here and now in the hearts of the faithful. As theology, following Anselm of Canterbury, is “faith seeking understanding,” the experience of God mediated liturgically may inspire theological discussion, but without the experience of living faith mediated liturgically, such debates could become hallow at best, ideologically driven at worst. The liturgical uses of the Creed, then, should be seen primarily as an act of worship inviting all present to an encounter with God.
It’s also worth mentioning the role of music in assisting in the process. Indeed, the numerous musical settings of the creed help raise the heart and mind to an encounter with God through words, key, rhythm, and orchestration. Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie notes that the “structured and stylized forms of musical sounds in time (…) makes possible a heightened emotional involvement with the extra-musical reality or realities being engaged.” (5) For example, consider an experience of listening to et incarnatus est from Mozart’s Spätzenmesse or the transition between the major and minor key when singing “and rose again on the third day according to the scriptures” in Healey Willan’s Missa de Sancta Maria Magdalena. In both examples the way that the musical rhythms, keys, and tempos accentuate the meaning of the words appeals to the emotions (and thus to the more intuitive side of knowing). This thereby helps one to experience the incarnation and resurrection (respectfully) in a more tangible and thus potentially transformative way.. Such “active participation” either by prayerfully listening or singing is also a creative act insofar as it engages the imagination, that “Living Power and prime Agent” which in a human way participates in the “eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” so valued by Coleridge.
One may note that this all still seems rather abstract at best, unrealistic at worst. Moreover, what about the issue of exclusiveness and how the creeds (and perhaps our liturgies as a whole) serve to create barriers to others rather than bridges? To address this, I am indebted to French theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet who understands liturgical prayer as possessing a therapeutic function, helping participants to work-through their sinful self-centeredness and thereby opening them to God and others. (6) One of the strengths of worshipping in a liturgical tradition is that one does not need to invent a new service each day or week, rather one is invited to adopt the symbolic and sacramental universe of the church and trust that it will enable an individual to have a living encounter with God. For Chauvet, regular liturgical worship – which includes the recitation of the Creed – helps us attain a treasure which is “nothing but the slow self-change whereby the subject succeeds in producing fruit as a result of the painful plowing and tilling of the field of its desire.” (7) Indeed, the liturgy does de-center us, as we’ve explored in this article, but as Christians this de-centering is what enables us to become members of the Church, the mystic body of Christ in the world, and thus receive the means of encountering God in Word, Sacrament, and world. This renewed desire which becomes more receptive to others and less desiring control and mastery over them is for Chauvet only attainable if we work at eradicating “our primary narcissism, that is to say, our imaginary omnipotence and right-to-enjoy everything.” (8) Each time we attend Eucharist or recite the Daily Office, then, we put the words of an other (the whole church) into our mouths, and learn to expand our prayers and by extension our desire to include more and more people: we are not our own, we belong to God and to each other as fellow members of the mystic body of Christ.
When liturgically reciting or singing the Creed, then, we are freed by its de-centering work to humbly accept a tradition which is not our own and which we have received from the Communion of Saints living and dead. We accept these words and cadences as not only being hallowed by millennia of use, but also by the fact that they mediate the potential for a real and transformative encounter with the Living God. By affirming our belief in “God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth,” His Son “Jesus Christ our Lord,” the life -giving Spirit, and a church which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, we are not erecting barriers so much as we are inheriting and appropriating a tradition which has produced and still has the potential of creating saints who are motivated by love of God and neighbor. In every age, Christians are called to inherit and appropriate the words of the Creed as a means of connecting with Christ and his mystic body that is the Church. If we find ourselves encountering the Creed as a means of division and exclusion, we should then reconnect with the poetic, imaginative, and creative nature of liturgical language which is about inclusive transformation and never about exclusive self-assuredness.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————--
1) Thomas Morley, Madrigals to Four voyces, Book I (1594).
2) David Jasper, The Language of Liturgy: A Ritual Poetics (London: SCM Press, 2018), 20. Quoting S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817). James Engell and W. Jackson Bate Eds. Collected Works, Vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Vol. 1, p. 304.
3) Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology (New York: Routledge, 1990), 20.
4) A similar point was made by Gregory Nazianzus throughout his Five Theological Orations. One example: “For when we leave off believing, and protect ourselves by mere strength of argument, and destroy the claim which the Spirit has upon our faith by questionings, and then our argument is not strong enough for the importance of the subject (…) Be ye reconciled to God, and quench not the Spirit; or rather, may Christ be reconciled to you, and may the Spirit enlighten you, though so late. But if you are too fond of your quarrel, we at any rate will hold fast to the Trinity, and by the Trinity may we be saved” (Gregory Nazianzus, “The Third Theological Oration,” #21 in Gregory Nazianzen, Orations 27-32: The Five Theological Orations. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, Trans.). Accessed on: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/five-theological-orations-11646.
5) Jeremy S. Begbie, Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), 110.
6) This is a reading of Chauvet I develop more fully and from the perspective of philosophy of religion in: T. Derrick Witherington, “Learning to let go: An examination of the pedagogical role of suffering in the ‘working-through’ of metaphysics.’” The Heythrop Journal 63 no. 5 (2022), 1007-1021).
7) Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995), 98.
8) Ibid.
