A life in letters: Creed for a Christian Sceptic 1

I bought the UK edition of this book, by Mary McDermott Shideler, shortly after it was published in 1970. The work is a thoughtful exercise in apologetics, informed by the works of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, an exploration of the Apostles’ Creed.

It was issued in the UK by evangelical publishers Marshall, Morgan and Scott, and I bought my copy in Pickering and Inglis bookshop in Glasgow which had its origins in Brethrenism. To reassure potential purchasers who might otherwise have been dissuaded by the book’s title, it carried a Foreword in which the evangelical scholar (and Brethren member) Professor F. F. Bruce gave the work his imprimatur.

Creed is indeed broadly evangelical in its theology (except perhaps in its assertion in comparing ‘immortality’ and ‘resurrection’ that at death ‘the entire person [body and spirit] dies in all his aspects and functions, and that the entire person is raised from the dead….That which was wholly lost in death is wholly restored [at the resurrection.]’ (p147-148) ) But its theology is much more radical in its thinking than the evangelicalism I had hitherto been exposed to.

I do remember reading the book, though it did not as a whole make a great impact on me.  What is interesting, however, is that I was instantly attracted by the title when I saw it on the shelf. Although not able to fully recognise or acknowledge it, I was already at that stage a sceptic, troubled by questions, never comfortable simply with conforming, with embracing the traditional ‘answers’, not all of which seemed to ‘work’ for me.

Bruce quotes in his foreword the ancient Greek aphorism that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but for me, questioning and examination made life hard to live as I felt torn between agnostic, sceptical questioning, and the (for me) unattainable certainty and conformity which the Christians I knew evidenced. One of the reasons I couldn’t regard myself as a Christian in 1970 was the fact that my experience of life seemed different from theirs.

A Creed for a Christian Sceptic, therefore, was the book for me, with its assurance that it’s OK to question. Re-reading the book four decades on I see that it contains all the key lessons I would need to learn if I was to be comfortable in the questioning faith which is my birthright. But in fact it would be another thirty years before I had begun to internalise some of these things. At the time, I read Creed without having the self-knowledge to see in detail its relevance to my life.

One thing which strikes me in re-reading the book is the sexism of the language. Everything is expressed in male terms, and the author even refers to herself as a ‘layman’. The past is indeed a foreign country!

Here are the key lessons which the Creed contains, and which I would later learn:

1. The insight that theological systems are not ‘final, unchangeable positions,’ but ‘progress reports on a continuing enterprise’ (p13)  I did not understand this in 1970, even though I was dimly aware of the difficulty of squeezing all my experience of reality into the prevailing wineskins of evangelicalism. Some of us, says Shideler (myself at that time included) when faced with conflicting views on faith-related issues ‘tend to hope for a conclusive settlement of claims, when the best that a Christian theology can give them is increasing illumination’ (p13) Still in 1980, using my staff discount to purchase books from the Scripture Union Bookshop before moving on to a new job, I thought I was squirreling away all the theology I would ever need.

2. The image of Christian faith as a journey, which was to become so important to me, is in Creed too. Shideler is not seeking, she tells her readers to show the Christian life ‘as a state to be achieved’ but ‘as a continuing process in which the most important thing is not where we are at any particular moment, but in what direction we are moving.’ (p15) Until the later 1990s, I saw the goal of Christian faith as arrival in some promised land of certainty, and was perplexed by the length of my journeying, fearing that my failures had mired me in endless wilderness.  And so it took me 30 years to discover what Shideler already knew – that the journey is the thing.

3. Mary McDermott Shideler is also interesting on the purpose of creeds and statements of faith. My perception as a young man was that conformity to creeds was a way of keeping the church pure, and defining who was ‘in’ and who ‘out’, who was ‘evangelical’ and who ‘liberal’, who was ‘one of us’ and who ‘one of them.’ I had, with some hesitation, signed a declaration  of faith when joining the Strathclyde University Christian Union in 1974. But Shideler sees the role of a belief system as being neither to confine, nor to exclude people, but to anchor us. Thus she says that the Creeds in general and the Apostles’ Creed in particular do not present ‘a high, rigid and divisive wall’ identifying who is ‘in’ who ‘out’, but a body of belief common to all those who have ‘taken as their centre of reference the Christian faith and community’ (p20) She emphasises that ‘detailed conformity is not the critical consideration, but direction of reference.’ (p20)  This is language with which I am comfortable. Even at times when my faith is at its most minimalistic, I have still, by God’s grace, been able to say ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ and on this centre I take my stand.

Read Part 2