Being United In and With Otherness Everywhere and Always

After firmly establishing that the holy Spirit is nothing less than the One God who no less finds equal expression in Christ, the Creed turns its attention toward the myriad ways in which we have, are, and will continue to experience the activity and the presence of the Spirit among us; and, perhaps more importantly, what those experiences call us to actively embrace.

The Spirit is identified as the One giving voice to the prophets. First, this should put to flight all thought or claims made toward seeing the Spirit as something uniquely given to the Church per se. We may want to claim Pentecost as the birthday of the Church (though I am not sure what that gains us), but it is, biblically speaking, most definitely not the birth of the Spirit either in the cosmos or among people. There is a long pre-history to the Church’s Pentecost experience which gives voice to the presence and activity of God’s Spirit, not only in regards to the prophets, but beginning with creation itself. In regards to prophets and prophecy, I believe it is immensely important to call into question what has become a very popular way of perceiving and understanding biblical prophecy. It is most decidedly not about predicting future events. Biblical prophets are not to be equated in our minds with fortune telling of any sort. In fact, they devote almost no attention whatsoever to the future - except as a consequence of not paying heed to their hyper-intensified focus on the present moment. Prophets, biblically speaking, are those who are intent on reading the signs of the times, trying to discern the presence and activity of God in the midst of the present time so that we may be better enabled to exercise the will of God in such times. The Book of Isaiah, a collection of writings which date from about 750 years to 500 years before Jesus, are obviously not the product of one person. However, being a collection of a similar school of thought dispersed through different situations and circumstances, Isaiah gives us a rather unique glimpse at what might be considered the dominant forms of biblical prophecy.

Taken as a whole, Isaiah provides reflection on three particular and different contextual moments in the history of Israel. First, the first forty chapters revolve around a time (which we considered earlier in this study of the Creed) when all hell was about to come down upon the Jewish people. Assyria, the great empire to the north, was threatening to invade and inflict its might upon those who inhabited the Palestinian crossroads. It was a time when people felt compelled to seek safe alliances to assure their own security. At that time the voice of the prophet was one raised in warning. Security, the prophet claimed, sought through any military alliance should be seen as not only precarious, it should also be seen as an inadequate substitution for trusting God. Second, the next few chapters reflect a time in which the Jewish people, after another hellish experience, had found themselves exiled in the foreign land of Babylon. They were becoming a people beginning to despair of their future. In that moment the prophetic voice spoke words to promote hope and foster trust in a God who had not abandoned them but was still among them in the midst of their exile. Lastly, the final chapters of Isaiah were written in the context of a time when the Jewish people, having - in some sense - miraculously returned to the Promised Land , soon discovered that it wasn’t exactly what they had bargained for. Starting over in a war-ravaged land, now occupied by others who were already well-established in the land, presented a task both discouraging and overwhelming. Here the prophetic voice became one of encouragement. Prophets are essentially those who through the voice of warning, hope, or encouragement help us to navigate our way through changing and challenging times, enabling us to navigate our way through changes that will undoubtedly be required of us in the midst of such times. It is the Spirit of God which the Church claims as the guiding principle which is ever continuously and creatively moving among us.

Now, as we move into what are the concluding statements of the Creed, we come to be confronted by what I like to call the “exclamation points” which the original composers intentionally placed here in the midst of this third article on the Holy Spirit - which is, as they see it, the navigating spirit of God present with us throughout all time and space no matter how we may conceive of these.

“In One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church…”

First, the Church is not - as most English renditions of the Creed express, an article of “belief”. “We believe…” do not appear in the original Creed at the mention of the Church. We neither believe nor trust the Church, we are the Church. What needs clarification is what the Church is that we are a part of. Remembering that the initiative and inspiration for the original composers of the Creed was to arrive at what they agreed held them together as one - despite whatever differences of opinion they could generate among themselves, we need to see these four marks of the Church as unifying and not as divisive in any way. There is therefore first, One Church. There is not one “true” Church standing separate and in opposition to or over other pretenders to such a claim. There is simply One Church in which all, by the working of the Holy Spirit of God, are as mysteriously One as the Father, Christ, and the Spirit are One. There is nothing we can do to either determine who is the Church or who is not. There is, by the grace of God, One Church and we are members of it and, like it or not, so are “they”

Second, the Church is Holy. Holy is a word which carries for us all kinds of associations which have to do with perceptions of sacredness or piousness. How we understand those perceptions, in either positive or negative ways, is largely subjective or personal. We can easily adopt a “holier-than-thou” attitude towards all things we deem are not up to the proper standards of all things “holy” in our minds by our determination. Such attitudes, however, serve mightily to divide our understanding of the Church. Biblically speaking, holiness - particularly in a Hebraic understanding - always carries a sense of otherness. God is other and never more so than in being whatever God will be - which is the very derivation of the Hebraic term ascribed to the God who cannot be named. YHWH (Yahweh), the response God gives to Moses at the burning bush when Moses inquires what name we should call upon, basically means “I am what I am” or “I will be whoever or whatever I will be”. In other words, “Don’t be too swift into thinking you can box me in some misguided attempt to control me, for I will break out of that box and be something other than you expect. I am, after all, God and I am free to do that”. So, in acknowledging that God is in holiness “other”, free to be present and active in all manner of things which are other than what we might envision God as being, then encountering “otherness” in the world - and particularly in the Church - carries for us opportunities, as scripture suggests, to “entertain angels unawares”. Otherness within the Church should not cause alarm or need to be defended or guarded against. Instead, it should be contemplated in a spirit of openness. In such openness of heart and mind we may be able to more adequately discern the Otherness (Holiness) of God’s Holy (Other) Spirit among us.

Third, the term “Catholic” has, particularly among Protestants with its association to the Roman Catholic Church, has caused some confusion. Simply put, the word designates something which is universal, which may be found everywhere, something which is a world-wide phenomena. In other words, what the Creed is getting at here, is an understanding that the Church, in its reflective Oneness and Holiness (Otherness) of the God in whom we trust, is beyond any worldly boundaries, denominational or otherwise. All those lesser allegiances of ours, through which we may want to apply an understanding of who is and who is not within the embrace of the One God, are simply misplaced.

Finally, the Church is “Apostolic”. While this designation does tie us back to the original “apostles”, it goes beyond that. When we think of a post, whether in terms of a military post or a fence post which is driven into the ground, we think of something which is firmly set and intended to be stationary. Adding an “a” as a prefix to any word inverts the meaning of the root word. Thus to be a-postolic is be on the move, to be sent out. In this case it is about the Church’s movement through time. Just as the Church lives and breathes and has its being throughout whatever we conceive of as geographical space (its catholicity), the Church is equally understood to extend through time in ways which expand our concept of unity with those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. Unity, we must remember, was the stated goal of this Creed. Constantine, seeking unity for the wide diversity which existed within the Roman Empire, caught a glimpse of the great vision of the unity which the Church espoused for itself and the world. The Creed’s intent was to ease the various theological conflicts within the Church which were threatening to keep Christians at odds with one another. What the composers of the Creed created was a means to voice that mysterious union we all share in God, a unity which is quite beyond whatever affiliations we cling to nationally, ethnically, linguistically, denominationally, congregationally, indeed perhaps even religiously. This unity of God, by the grace of God, knows neither the bounds of space or time. The original composers of the Creed succeeded in upholding that mysterious union of the Church regardless of how the churches have again and again, throughout the centuries and into our own time, have failed to live it out in genuine love.

[An aside: The word embraced by early Christians which gets translated into English as “Church” is the Greek word: “ecclesias” as in ecclesiastical. (We might also rightfully hear the word “elect” in that word; however, our tendency to ascribe a privileged status to our understanding of that word is misleadingly dangerous). The actual meaning of the word derives from its prefix “ex”, meaning “out”; and its root “cle” which gives us the English word “call”. Thus, linguistically, the Church is understood as a people “called out”. What I’d like to claim is that this understanding is less about being called out and away from other people but, rather, being a people called out of being what is so commonly understood and accepted as “people just being people”. Instead, we in the Church are to be a people extraordinarily called out of being “people just being people”. The Church, as the Creed suggests, are a people called out to be god-like just as Jesus enfleshed as a human being was perceived and claimed to be God.]