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The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters Luke Timothy Johnson Doubleday, 324 pages, $23.95

CREEDS ARE LIKE SEATBELTS. They won't do you any good unless you use them. The recent folly of the Episcopal Church, USA (ECUSA) shows what happens when a group says a creed but doesn't hold itself accountable to it.

Think of Luke Timothy Johnson's The Creed as a user's manual. It is not just an excellent commentary on the content of the Nicene Creed (more properly known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). It is a handbook to faith, and its fundamental argument is that while faith is our very personal response to God, our response must be shaped by specific beliefs about God.

Johnson is a Roman Catholic New Testament scholar, and Protestants might not expect to hear a Catholic argue that faith is fundamentally a personal response to God. But Johnson, who teaches at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, was part of the wave of Catholic thinkers that, in the wake of Vatican II, rejected the church's old emphasis on faith as merely giving assent to propositions. They revived the personal and the communal, while de-emphasizing the priestly and institutional dimensions of faith.

Johnson still holds "as strongly as ever that faith in God is an existential response of the whole person characterized by trust, obedience, and loyalty." But over the past 30 years, he has seen where an emphasis on existential response—stripped of defining content—can lead. So now, he says, he has "come to appreciate how critical the role of belief is in structuring that response." Amen.

There is a popular tendency to dismiss the creeds as post-apostolic inventions that are, as Johnson writes, "instruments of politics rather than piety, of coercion rather than freedom, of philosophy more than gospel." Johnson straightens out this ecclesiastical equivalent of urban legend.

He shows how the creeds are the natural growth of seeds planted by the apostles. Already in the New Testament, there is a strong impulse to safeguard the essentials of the faith. Commenting on 1 Corinthians 15, he says, "Getting the story wrong in its essentials amounts to 'believing in vain.'" And on 1 John 2:22, he writes, "Getting Jesus wrong is also getting God wrong."

And if the Creed is couched in philosophical language, that is only because the key fourth-century challenges to the heart of the faith were framed in philosophical categories.

Positively, Johnson says the Creed defines the Christian faith in much the same way that the rulebook defines baseball. The rules of baseball distinguish "the game from other team sports played with balls, but [do] not exhaust the possibilities of excitement, valor, excellence, and failure inherent in the sport as actually played."

Likewise, the Creed establishes "boundaries for and around the Christian people," but it "does not exhaust the meaning of Christian life and practice."

The seatbelt analogy I began with appealed to me because my own denomination (ECUSA) is having a very bumpy ride theologically. But Johnson's baseball metaphor illustrates the freedom the Creed gives us. As long as you don't move first base or allow pitchers to throw bean balls, we can all have a good time. As long as theologians and pastors don't teach that Jesus was just a good man or that he didn't rise from the grave, they can engage in a lot of theological playfulness. Johnson praises the Creed's parsimony because it provides a defined freedom.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11