Musings in Plainclothes: The Apostles’ Creed Today

A colleague of mine begins his introductory theology course every semester by offering an “A” to any student who can recite the Apostle’s Creed. What is of great interest about this is that to date, he has never had a student earn an "A" doing it. The majority, coming from evangelical churches, don’t even know what he is talking about. For whatever reason, for most of these hundreds of students my colleague has worked with, and perhaps for many churches today, the Apostles’ Creed is not in use at all.

Why not?  

Fear of Appearing Like a Cult

There are perhaps many reasons. Perhaps today the Apostles’ Creed is considered too old fashioned or traditional. Or perhaps, for many churches, reciting the Apostles’ Creed might make us sound conformist.

TV occasionally presents us with weird cults where initiates recite strange chants as they move into the darker depths of their experiences. Though these are mostly parodies, they cut to the heart of real fears we have about what can come from such mindless chanting and conformity. Even as the memory recedes of the mass suicide of the cult at Jonestown late in 1978, we fear group-think, especially when we see it combined with religious beliefs and a powerful, charismatic leader. The cliché, to “drink the Kool-aid,” is our reminder of this undesirable human tendency.

Instead, I suppose we are drawn to daring people who act by their convictions and go against strong pressures to conform. In the nineties, about fourteen years ago, I followed the excitement of Fox Mulder’s quest on TV’s X-Files for what this show called “the truth” as, from week to week he went by his own lights (and what lights were to be gained from a Harvard education). Though I had already read a lot of the esoterica that Mulder seemed to have at his instant recall as he solved some real mysteries, I never really shared his attraction to various strange heresies. Yet I respected Mulder’s conviction that the world was bigger and more unusual than the world handed to him by his FBI elders. I respected his desire to know the truth, even his conviction that, as the show put it, “the truth is out there,” and it's bigger than our consumer-minded American ideology. Mulder’s openness to experiences not explained through his partner Scully’s scientific method reflects something deep in our current American psyche. There’s something of the American way in Mulder’s uncompromising quest.

After a while, though, I started to have trouble with Mulder’s need to be after something new, some new discovery, every week. All the time. After a while, all of his disjointed “experiences,” which were constantly denied by the government, didn’t really add up to anything that might be called “transformative.” The program simply represented, to me at least, a cult of the continually new. The message after a while seemed to be, “What matters is that we are here this week.”

The way I see it, though, we don’t necessarily need to go by our own lights all the time.

When the early Christians recited the Apostle's Creed, or one of its earlier forms, often when being baptized, they were joining a local community, certainly, but they were also joining the universal church. When we recite today its widely accepted statements about the God in whom Christians believe, we are being introduced to this God. And though we may later experience many doubts and face many trials, in reciting the Creed, we acknowledge a unity that cuts across many cultural divides.