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What triggered your insight that what we believe is important for how we respond to God in faith?

I was helped by the emergence of cognitive psychology, which is very close to my reading in ancient Greco-Roman moralists. They share the understanding that people act and feel on the basis of what they think.

I began to understand that creedal statements do not simply report events, but they construct the world in a way that guides experience and practices. The subjectivism that emphasizes how one feels about something is clearly inadequate to sustain the life of a community.

To illustrate that, I recently heard an Episcopal bishop explain that theology played no part in his support for the sexuality decisions of the Episcopal General Convention. It was just his pastoral experience.

He is to be faulted on one important point, which is that pastoral experience itself has to be constructed theologically. If one has an understanding, for example, of pastoral experience as discerning what God is doing in the world and this is understood theologically as ongoing revelation, well then there's some support for saying that people's experience might count as a source of revelation. But it is precisely the failure to even apprehend that sort of thing and to think theologically, which is connected to the lack of spine in contemporary theological thinking.

In your earlier writing about Jesus, you made a point of writing as a scholar inside the church. How does your earlier writing relate to what you've now written about the Creed?

In two ways. First, I wrote a book last year with Bill Kurz called The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship. I devoted three chapters to how the vast majority of people in Christian History read Scripture in contrast to the last 300 years. I began to understand more deeply the very different way in which our fathers in the faith read Scripture.

That book prepared for this one because this book is really a scriptural apprehension of the Creed. I found myself thinking not as a post-Enlightenment critic, but rather with the associative approach of patristic writers.

For example, when I began to consider the Creed's statement that "he ascended into heaven," my first reaction as a 21st-century historical critic was to isolate the incident and say, "Well there's only one account of the Ascension (at the end of the Gospel of Luke and the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles). Otherwise, where's Ascension in the New Testament?"

But once I started to think about Ascension in more holistic terms, I began to grasp what the Fathers grasped—and that is that everywhere in the New Testament, the Resurrection is understood not as resuscitation, but as elevation, as exaltation, as enthronement, as entering into God's presence.

Second, the Creed is a guide to reading the New Testament. It gets what is essential in the Christian story. And what is essential is its mythic dimension. It is rooted in historical events of the Crucifixion, the burial, the Resurrection, and the historical persons, Jesus, Mary, and Pontius Pilate. But at heart, the Christian claim is mythic, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to God's self. The creed's understanding, in other words, is ontological and not historical.

Many readers will stumble over that word myth. I notice that you called all these events historical, but you turned to the word mythic as you began to discuss the question of meaning and God's purposes.

Yes, exactly. When Christians speak mythically, they are not speaking fantasy or untruth. Rather, since God is not defined by the categories of space and time, whenever we make a statement about God and God's involvement in humanity, we need a mode of language that goes beyond the historical. The historical only gives us the Reed Sea. It doesn't give us the Exodus.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11