What is Mere Christianity? Part 3: Myron B. Penner Answers

Reflections

This past week, I recorded a 1.5 hour conversation on theodicy and the problem of animal pain with popular atheist YouTuber Phil Harper (aka Skydive Phil). (The video will be up on YouTube in a few weeks.) Phil raised the standard problem about animal suffering and theism. But he also wanted to talk about the treatment of animals in the Bible.

However, I told Phil that I would not be discussing animal suffering in the Bible because my self-imposed goal was to defend mere Christianity. And for the purposes of this discussion, I said, mere Christianity can be defined approximately in the terms of the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe 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 creedal statement doesn’t include specific claims about the treatment of animals as described in the Hebrew scriptures, and consequently, that topic was beyond the purview of my specific defense.

All this is to say that I have a good deal of sympathy with Penner’s succinct answer. There are several factors that make the Apostles’ Creed an appealing answer. The first two points apply to creeds in general and the final two are specific to the Apostles’ Creed:

First, creeds are meant to function as acts of corporate confession rather than individualized belief: this is always our belief rather than simply the belief of the individual.

Second, creeds are doxological in orientation: as part of a formal service, they seamlessly weave together belief and action by making corporate confession a performative act of worship.

Third, the Apostles’ Creed is ancient (dating in its earliest form to the Roman Creed of the mid-second century).

Fourth, the Apostles’ Creed is arguably the most universal and widely confessed of Christian creeds. (The only other contender is the Nicene Creed.)

However, pressing the Apostles’ Creed into service as the description of mere Christianity does raise some questions. These questions pertain both to the necessity and sufficiency of precisely this list of claims.

Necessity For the problem of necessity, we can consider the prominent inclusion of the virgin birth. (As we proceed, keep in mind that the doctrine of the virgin birth, in fact, refers to the supernatural conception of Jesus apart from a coital act. Technically, the doctrine of the virgin birth proper refers to the claim that the parturition of Jesus was itself, in some sense, a miraculous act. That doctrine is not our concern here.)

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) is recognized as one of the leading Christian theologians of the late twentieth century. Yet, in his 1968 book Jesus: God and Man, he developed an extensive critique of the miraculous virgin birth, a doctrine which he believed was tied to Catholic Mariology. In short, Pannenberg would confess the Apostles’ Creed, but only with a significant qualification (or rejection) of one of its core affirmations: Jesus was not virginally conceived.

Nor is Pannenberg the only theologian to take this position. Another leading theologian of the twentieth century, Emil Brunner, also rejected the confession of the virgin birth, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

If we take the Apostles’ Creed to provide the essential description of mere Christianity, then it would seem that leading Christian theologians like Pannenberg and Brunner exclude themselves from mere Christianity in virtue of rejecting the virgin birth.

(Even more surprisingly, a person who accepted everything in the creed except the claim that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate specifically, would thereby exclude themselves from the confession of mere Christianity.)

One possible response is to abandon the strong assumption that the Apostles’ Creed provides the necessary set of claims for mere Christianity. Perhaps, instead, it simply provides an authoritative working template for the core confessions of mere Christianity. In short, we could think of the creed as a centering document rather than a boundary document.

At the same time, this revised interpretation raises some significant objections. There still must be at least some boundaries secured by this document. After all, the creed was confessed to distinguish Christians from other groups like Marcionists and Gnostics. Thus, the question returns: which confessions within the Apostles’ Creed are essential for securing the boundaries?

Sufficiency As for the topic of sufficiency, we need only point out that a person could confess the Apostles’ Creed in its entirety and believe something highly unorthodox such as that the Son was created by the conceiving act of the impersonal Holy Spirit which is simply emblematic of the power of the Father. And this interpretation would reject several doctrines widely considered essential for orthodoxy including the Trinity, the pre-existence of the Son, and the personhood of the Holy Spirit.

One might reply to this concern by saying that the interpretation of the Creed is fixed by the Christian communities that have confessed it. Consequently, it is not sufficient to confess the statements that compose the Creed. In that act of confession, one must affirm a particular interpretation of those statements, e.g. content that is consistent with Trinitarianism but not with Unitarianism or Arianism.

Okay, that’s possible, I suppose. But then what exactly is the legitimate range of interpretation for the Creed?

Ironically, we now find ourselves with the conclusion that an answer to the question “What is mere Christianity?” which seemed, at first blush, so very simple is in fact, very complicated.