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The Creed Interprets Scripture
The creed does not dictate how Scripture is to be read in all its richness and diversity, but it provides an epitome or summary that guides and directs the proper reading of Scripture. Apart from the few places where it uses terms from ancient philosophy, it draws all its language from Scripture. The story told by the creed is itself drawn from the great story line of Scripture. It omits great portions of Scripture, to be sure. It focuses on the birth of Jesus and his death and resurrection, which means that the focus is really on soteriology, the way in which humans have been saved through God's work in Christ.

That this is less than a full or adequate representation of the scriptural witness is clear. Nevertheless, the creed provides a guide for the correct understanding of the heart of Scripture and its overall intent. Any reading of Scripture that has it teaching of multiple gods or the equality of evil with good, or that Jesus was not fully human, or a sectarian view of the church, is, by the measure of the creed, a false reading. The creed unobtrusively but effectively supplies the Christian people with the code for understanding its sacred text.

The Creed Constructs a World
Those reciting the creed thereby construct a world based on the Christian myth and Scripture. The world is not simply given to us, so that its nature and meaning is self-evident. It is constantly under construction by us as we give meaning to it. To be sure, those building the world this way deny that they are the builders. They see themselves rather as describing the world that has been "given" to all by nature or God.

Only when we are exposed to other people's dramatically different understandings of reality do we begin to perceive that "the world" is a more malleable place than we had thought. Others understand the world in quite different terms. Thus, to claim—and to live by the claim—that our world is one that is being created by the one God who makes everything that exists is to make a claim that competes with other claims.

Not every construction of the world can be true. God either creates all that is, or God doesn't. But humans are not in a position to adjudicate between competing world constructions. Contemporary Christians—who have been brought to this awareness more sharply than in any previous age—recognize that their world is not everybody's world. The world as constructed by Hinduism or Confucianism is simply not the same world that is constructed by the Bible and the Christian creed. Christians must acknowledge, furthermore, that they cannot demonstrate the superiority of their world to that of others. They must, therefore, live in the tension inherent in what has been called the "post-modern condition": they affirm the truth of the world as expressed in the creed even as they know that other creeds construct other worlds that are just as believable—just as "livable"—as the Christians'.

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October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47