Creeds and Deeds

Mystical Seeker mentioned a church that professes to be about "deeds rather than creeds."

It is easy to understand the appeal of such a statement--wanting a church that is more about actions than talking, more about justice than empty dogma.

However, creeds are inevitable. At some point, any group of people has to be about something. That means, by default, they are not about something else. Every group has some kind of organizing principle, something they rally around. Even churches out there that profess to be "non-creedal" often have a mission statement, criteria for membership and a list of values.

Ironically, "deeds rather than creeds" is, in fact, a creed.

Creeds are unpopular because a lot of folks grew up in churches where dogma was rammed down their throats by folks who hardly even understood what they were preaching. Something like the Nicene Creed becomes just an empty statement about abstract theology that hardly makes sense or has any relevance to life. The Creed just looks like an assertion of power and conformity, rather than an educational opportunity and a chance for a group to pass down traditions. It becomes like the Pledge of Allegiance--just a patriotism test.

The amazing thing is that every social justice statement of the Christian churches comes directly out of the creedal statements. The "deeds" they are talking about are derived from the "creeds." It just takes a lot of theology to see how that all works.

Charity and social justice are fundamental to Christian theology. However, they are rooted in something much deeper--our very concept of God: God as Trinity. God as something other than us. God Incarnate into human existence. Creation as a gift that didn't have to be. All these most basic, fundamental notions--axioms--of orthodox Christian theology all feed directly--and explain--the impulse to "do good."

How can the concept of Trinity compel us to act toward social justice, for example?

Tradition has handed down the belief that God is one. Tradition has also handed down the belief that God is three--Father, Son and Spirit. How can both be true? Christians wrestled with this and came up with an understanding that our God is Trinity--one and three at the same time.

St. Gregory of Nyssa does a good job of making the connections in his Sermon on the Beatitudes 7. God as Trinity is the living embodiment of unity in diversity, because the Trinity is truly one, but also distinct in three-ness, too. Christ says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" (New American Bible Matthew 5:9). God is a force of peace, maintaining distinctions but in perfect unity. When peacemakers are able to bring this about, they are, in a sense, doing something very fundamentally God-like--easing divisions without tampering with the dignity of individuals. They earn the right to be called children of God because they are manifesting what God is.


The very reason we think that being a peacemaker is a good thing is because it jives with how we understand how God and the world relate. The fact that everyone calls God "Our Father" is an outrageously radical statement. If God is the Father to all, then that must mean that all are sisters and brothers, and if we are all family it helps us understand our deep kinship and responsibilities to each other.


I recently took a class on Catholic Social Teaching. During the whole semester, I struggled with the reading choices of the professor. You would think that we'd be reading and endless stack of papal encyclicals on justice and getting into the nitty gritty of how to approach issues as a moral dilemma. And we did some of that. But we also spent an outrageous amount of time reading some rather abstract theology that was all about axioms of Christianity.


One book was The God of Faith and Reason by Robert Sokolowski. It was all about "the Christian distinction"--the idea that God is other than us and that Creation is a gift that never had to be. These are some of the most basic truths on top of which the entire Abrahamic tradition is based. The idea that God did not have to create the world means that God did it as a gift. As a result, the only proper response from us is gratitude. This sense of gratitude is at the foundation of our respect for the world and for the fruits of Creation. After the semester was over, I finally understood why this book was chosen and why it was more important to understand this concept than to have a cursory understanding of the minutiae of the papal encyclicals.

I'm suspicious of a church that is about "deeds rather than creeds." I would want to know which deeds they value and why. If they don't have an answer to that, then that leaves a couple of options: Either they have a very innocent instinct to do service that they can't explain, or else they are leaving the heavy lifting to other churches who have worked out the theology. If the latter is true, this church exists in orbit around the orthodox Christian churches and cannot exist with them.