Category: Spirituality

In The Church that Forgot Christ, Jimmy Breslin muses on the phrase “descended into hell,” and accuses the Catholic Church of taking it out of the Nicene Creed when he wasn’t looking. Of course, nothing of the sort occurred; he’s simply confusing the Apostle’s Creed with the Nicene Creed.

Yet I must admit I too missed that phrase when I joined the Catholic Church and learned the Nicene Creed. I had been familiar with the Apostle’s Creed from my Methodist days, and that phrase, “descended into hell,” spoke to me of the fierceness of Christ’s love. J. Preston Eby saw it as evidence of universalism: If Christ would be willing to descend into hell once (1 Pet 3:18-20), he asked, wouldn’t he be willing to do it again?

When I wrote before that “the Creed” is difficult for me, I meant the Nicene Creed. It was created specifically to re-shape the Gospel into an official belief system which would exclude many Christians. I find the Apostle’s Creed much more a description of the flavor of trust in Christ. There are actually only two words I have trouble with in the Apostle’s Creed, only and virgin. Only, because I sense the entire Creation is the Child of God, and because Jesus himself taught all to call God “our Father.” Virgin, because I see the Lord’s example as theosis, more than kenosis. The “resurrection of the body” isn’t a problem for me, since I never took it to mean “physical body,” but it strikes me that “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting” is quite in harmony with the idea of reincarnation/rebirth, held by some early Christians. I would also translate *credo/pisteuo* as “trust,” since that’s a valid translation, and even as his brother said, it’s not about belief. (Jas. 2:19)

My statement of trust:

I trust in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ his Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I trust in the Holy Spirit; the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.

That’s the question up for discussion at Symphonic recently. I find it an oddly distressing question to grapple with for several reasons. I guess first among those is church has sometimes been an uncomfortable environment for me. I’ve been involved with almost every major expression of “church” in America, both Protestant and Catholic. I’ve been able to see the fragmented, self-isolating nature of the church in a way that people who stay within a single religious framework can’t. If pressed to give a definition of “church” as it is around us today, I’d say it’s a vehicle for a subset of the culture to express itself as being “Christian,” according to whatever that means to them.

An idea presented by Brian McLaren and others in Emergent is that “Protestant church” is a modern invention which is not addressing the post-modern world. (Catholicism/Orthodoxy is pre-modern and has a somewhat different set of problems.) So now many churches are exploring how to be a “new kind of Christian” which is a wonderful, exciting effort.

There’s one thing, though. I don’t think the Church has ever really worked managed to achieve but a fraction of its potential and purpose. [I had to re-word this since it was far too harsh and seemed to imply something I didn’t mean. But on the other hand, if something fails to achieve but a fraction of its potential and purpose, does it “work”?—Jon] And I don’t know if simply trying to find a new way of “being church” will be enough, since Christians have been trying that for two thousand years.

I think the core problem is that “salvation” is not understood. It has shifted to mean “going to heaven after you die,” and the magnificent Good News that Jesus proclaimed in his Kingdom teachings is reduced to a moral code. I believe that Jesus meant living in the Kingdom of God now, and enjoying the same essential union with God that he had.

When I read Paul, I see someone who was literally transformed by this union at once upon encountering Jesus, and I also see his frustration at the fact that other people weren’t. “How is it that you act as mere men?” he asks. He saw church as the sum of all Christs, with Jesus the “first-born of many brothers,” not as “mere men” who loved Jesus.

That, I think points to the essential problem of church today. The theotic transformation of humanity into divinity isn’t happening, except on a very, very small individual basis, and people often have to leave the church to even learn about it, let alone for it to happen. Even the concept of the teacher or master–a spiritually awakened person who lives in divinized human reality is missing. And if someone did appear in that role, in the overwhelming majority of most churches, she or he’d be driven out post-haste.

Why do I study Zen? to learn from a teacher. Without teachers, church makes for a very strange school. It’s as if the second-graders are teaching the first-graders. No wonder most of the kids are biding their time waiting for the bell to ring.