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Johnson spends a fair amount of time talking about the nature of religious language.

In the mouths of many scholars, such talk comes off as a way to distance theology from the historical events at the root of our faith. In Johnson's hands, however, talk about "myth" and "structuring the world" is a way to challenge fashionable intellectual trends.

When he says "myth," he is talking about the meaning Christian faith gives to our history. The statement "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself" puts a specific meaning to historical events. In also provides a framework of meaning in which we can see all other events.

Recapturing the big storyline is important in a postmodern society in which such "totalizing metanarratives" are supposed to be rejected simply because of their claims to universal significance. If there is any "one universal, unifying interpretation of the world" left in our society, Johnson writes, "it is some form of social Darwinism that reduces human life to the brutal competition to survive."

Such a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw narrative provides the building blocks of many peoples' worldviews. Christians are (or should be) different. The power of this scriptural worldview—as crystallized in the Creed—"should not be underestimated," Johnson writes, "especially in a world whose best alternative is an endless and pointless evolution."

Readers who are used to classifying theologians along a liberal-conservative continuum (or dividing them into sheep and goats) will have a difficult time imposing such categories on Johnson.

On the one hand, he does not tolerate theological nonsense. For example, in his recent Commonweal review of Elaine Pagel's latest apology for gnosticism, he called folly by its right name. In The Creed, he calls faddishly changing the "Our Father" to "Our Father-Mother" a form of "generational narcissism." And his 1996 book, The Real Jesus, was one of the most compelling responses to the silliness of the Jesus Seminar.

But Johnson is no slave to traditionalist pieties. In The Creed, he freely challenges his own church at its points of theological excess. He sees the insistence on the infallible authority accorded the bishop of Rome as "a case where the will to power has become so confused with theology that its practitioners actually think they are doing the latter when they are only exercising the former." And he treats Rome's "obsessive need to define the role of Mary" as "arbitrary and harmful."

Not all of Johnson's comments are to my liking. His passing remarks on creationism and millenarianism, for example, betray an outsider's inability to distinguish their varied forms in evangelicalism. But I found Johnson always bracing. He treats the core theological truths of the Christian faith not as abstractions but as foundations for revolutionary living.

For example, to say "Jesus is Lord" is to say that "none of us is lord over another." And to say God is the maker of all things is to learn to look to all things for what they reveal about the Creator. The Creed's distinctive way of believing is the foundation of a Christian's countercultural way of living.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Luke Timothy Johnson's The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters is this month's selection for CT's Editor's Bookshelf. Elsewhere on our site you can:

Read an excerpt from The Creed

Read a review of The Creed

Read an extended interview with author Luke Timothy Johnson

Buy the book online

More information is available from the publisher, including an excerpt.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11