A member recently told me that they threw away the poem Creed by Steve Turner (page 9 of the August newsletter) because they thought it was blasphemous—they did not realize that the poet was being satirical and was actually lampooning the culture that believes in “Marxfreudanddarwin” and that “everything is OK as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge.”
So, you can imagine the affront that several members expressed when some news service reported on the antics of Pr. Anna Helgen at Edina Community Lutheran Church in Minneapolis who used the following creed in place of the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed during worship:
I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural.
I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God.
I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.
I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder.
I believe in the call to each of us that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love.
I believe, glorious God. Help my unbelief.
Sadly, the author of this travesty—the Rev. Rachel Small Stokes, a UCC pastor—was not being tongue-in-cheek or using absurdity to point out the absurd. What started as typo generated by dictation software became, under the influence of social media, an affirmation of the “truths” she and the other progressive theologians that have hijacked once Biblically-based institutions promulgate instead of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), the faith represented by the historic Creeds of the Church.
On the one hand, I am not worried about such nonsense “catching on” in most churches; the generation of people who still felt the compulsion to be part of a church when any classically Christian convictions have long since left the building is quickly dying out. Younger heretics and apostates generally just leave the Church, which is why the old mainline denominations continue the decline they have been in for 50+ years. As commentator Mark Tooley notes, “In a few years, nobody will recall the sparkle creed. In one thousand years, millions still will recite the Nicene and Apostles Creeds.”
What I do want to draw your attention to is the way this “creed” cleverly uses orthodox-sounding phrases to promote ideas that are the exact opposite of the truths proclaimed for millennia by Christianity based on the Apostolic witness of actual interaction with Jesus and the content of the Holy Scriptures. This was a tactic regularly employed by the heretics we were required to read by like-minded professors at my now-defunct progressive seminary. The game was either to use new words or phrases that sounded like the sort of things Christians say (like “God is love;” see 1 John 4:7-21) or to recast the meaning of actual phrases and words from the lexicon of traditional Christianity, but give them a new meaning that was either partially different or the opposite of what they had originally meant. In the interest of space, I cannot do an in-depth analysis of the sparkle creed here, but that analysis will be available on my blog and as a printout in the social hall for those interested.
In any event, the goal of all these word games is, of course, is to play on the good desire of most people to think well of their fellow-church members—in Luther’s words from the Small Catechism, to “speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light”—in order to get them to swallow in small bites the lies they would spit out if presented to them whole. More importantly, the goal is to maintain enough institutional momentum so that the tithes will keep flowing well enough to allow those who hate the God who reveals Himself through sacred Scripture to use the human apparatus of the Church to deride and undermine faith in Him.
This has been happening for a long time, folks. In fact, it has been on the rise since the 1920’s. The difference now is that people who hate the God and Christ portrayed by the Scriptures have the momentum of the larger culture on their side, so they no longer feel the need to hide their true convictions. Such people are in stark eternal danger, so we need to pray for them even as we oppose them with a more faithful proclamation in our church and a more faithful way of living because of it. We also need to pray for those sit regularly under such teachings, pray that they either develop the strength to leave or, if they cannot do that for reasons beyond their control, stay strong and Biblically-grounded enough to know and reject falsehood, even when they find it in the mouth of a beloved friend, family member, or pastor.