Editoral: Your Chance to Change the Faith

This seems an appropriate time to talk to you about something I believe in. What I'm going to propose may sound radical and strange, but it would allow the best ideas of our time to inform our future through the best tools we have on hand.

In Estonia, the government website “Today I Decide,” allows citizens to comment on draft laws and to submit their own ideas. If a majority of participants approve the measure, the government reviews it. And last fall in New Zealand, the government launched a wiki (a site that anyone can edit) to solicit input on the wording of a Policing Act before introducing it to Parliament. France is echoing the notion; citizens can participate in a government online forum on laws currently being considered. And in England, anyone can submit an e-petition directly on the 10 Downing Street website. One in ten Brits have drafted or signed such a document.

The Internet can bring us closer to a participatory and representative democracy. Citizens might not be far from collectively drafting their own legislation. Certainly, today we can have our voices heard in ways that haven't happened since the demise of Athens.

Now obviously, the Nicene Creed is a touchstone of the faith for millions of Christians around the world. And I would not dream of supplanting or replacing it in Christian liturgy. But it is equally obvious to me that its meaning is not transparent in our time. To evacuate its significance requires a good deal of shifting theological and Scriptural ideas that were formulated nearly 2000 years ago. I would wager that many parishioners do not understand it, or interpret it altogether incorrectly.

Yes, the Nicene Creed has endured through the ages and it addresses the timeless story of the Trinity's interaction with humanity.

But it also tells a story very much grounded in its own time. It is the product of a Council specifically formed to counteract the heresies of the day- ideas that have ebbed and flowed throughout the centuries. Many of these internecine struggles have been resolved. Many of them no longer seem particularly relevant; for example, I do not hear many people crying out on street corners that Jesus was God, but not fully God.

And history has not stood still since then, either for the Church or for the world it's called to minister to. Since the formulation of the Creeds, schisms have split the Church- at first into East and West and later into Catholic and Protestant traditions. We have seen the priesthood of all believers, most sharply in Protestantism, but to a lesser degree paralleled by the reforms of the Council of Trent and Vatican II. We've shifted from Latin to vernacular languages. We've seen the roles of women change.

Intellectually, we understand Christ differently than our Neoplatonic fathers. In preaching and teaching and in the minds of many parishioners, we want to understand the mission and life of Christ as much as His death and resurrection. We want to know what He said and meant as much as what his death accomplished. We are much less concerned with metaphysical questions of how Being and Substance relate within the Trinity than we are concerned with how we relate to God and to one another.

And our questions are no less urgent. Sin persists, but the power sin wields has grown ever greater. We've seen a century of genocide. We've seen the resurrection of tyrannies as cruel as anything the ancient world ever knew, wielding weapons that could well kill extinguish humanity entirely. Poverty continues, but more people than ever experience it- presumably, more people are starving now than in the entirely of human history. Yet the rich live in greater separation from them, I believe, than in the time of Christ himself.

But the schisms of Christianity have not evaporated in the midst of what should be our common causes. The thriving of denominational life in America meant generations of people assuming common faith- with everyone who had the same minister. Being Christian in American has come to mean a set of choices: do I want Spirit and go Pentecostal? Teaching and Presbyter or Anglican? Evangelical and Baptist? Discipline and Methodist? What do I emphasize? And what do I give up?

Of course, we should not sacrifice anything, as Paul would emphatically remind us. The members of the body must work together; spiritual gifts function not in isolation, but in tandem. In the demise of Christendom as we have known it (and it is most certainly dying) it might be time to revisit our common ground. The collapse of Christianity's hold on centers of political and social power might also mean we can relax our hold on ancient words and ancient splits.

I propose, then, a Creed, formulated by the laity of the Christian church and adopted by such. I propose a project dedicated to answering the questions and controversies of the day through ecumenical dialogue and using the best mediating tools of the day: the Wikicreedia Project. Four years of broad based dialogue, (in the fashion of the original council) driven by ordinary parishioners and informed by modern clergy, ought to accomplish something.

I say we set it up. I say we make a web page with the questions and controversies of the day. I say we invite everyone we can to answer those challenges and come together in words, affirming what we can, even today, agree upon. If we're coming to the time when we can write our own secular laws, I don't see why we can't also claim responsibility for our religious beliefs.

At the very least, we would see what we actually believe, as opposed to what we are possibly just supposed to. Forming a creed is nothing if not a rigorous moral inventory. Then, at least, we will see where we actually stand- the most important part in deciding where to go.